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LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS 
UNIVERSITY SERIES 



EMERSON 



A Statement of New England Transcendentalism 

AS EXPRESSED IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
ITS CHIEF EXPONENT 



BY 



HENRY DAVID GRAY 

Associate Professor of English 



Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 

in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University, 

New York, 1904. 

Revised and published, 1917. 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA 

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY 

1917 



iWonegrap!' 



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LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS 
UNIVERSITY SERIES c^Tj 



EMERSON 



A Statement of New England Transcendentalism 

AS EXPRESSED IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
ITS CHIEF EXPONENT 



BY 

HENRY DAVID GRAY 



Associate Professor of English 



Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 

in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University, 

New York, 1904. 

Revised and published, 1917. 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA 

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY 

1917 



Stanford University 
Press 









A4^jf i) IW> 



CONTENTS 

PACE 

Introduction 7 

Chapter I. Beginnings of New England Transcendentalism: 
Channing and the Unitarian Movement ; Hedge and the "Tran- 
scendental Club" 1 8 

Chapter II. Emerson: His Philosophical Attitude and Method.. 25 

Chapter HI. The Philosophy of Emerson. Nature, the Over- 
Soul, and the Individual 33 

Chapter IV. The Philosophy of Emerson, continued. The 

Theories of Evolution and of Emanation 40 

Chapter V. The Philosophy of Emerson, continued. The Identity 

of Subject and Object 47 

Chapter VI. The Epistemological Basis of Emerson's Philosophy: 

The Theory of Intuition 5*^' 

Chapter VII. The Religious Implications of Emerson's Philos- 
ophy : The Nature of God ; Pluman Responsibility ; Immor- 
tality 61 

Chapter VIII. Emerson's Ethics : The Moral Law ; Origin of 

the Virtues ; Optimism /O 

Cfiapter IX. Emerson's Contribution to Sociology : The Indi- 
vidual and the State ; the Brook Farm Idea ; Theory of 
Education 80 

Chapter X. Emerson's Esthetics: The Meaning of Beauty; the 

Utility of Art 95 

Bibliography 105 

Index 109 



PREFACE 

This thesis was completed just at the time when Emerson's Journals 
were announced for publication. Thus it happened that the writer had 
either to print an essay which was antiquated in advance, or wait until 
the Journals could be read and the book revised in accordance with the 
"new evidence." The delay of publication — prolonged beyond all ex- 
pectation — was granted by the Columbia Faculty of Philosophy, and at 
the same time permission was given to add chapters on Emerson's con- 
tribution to ethics, sociology, and esthetics, in order that a certain com- 
pleteness might be given to the subject. The Journals continued to ap- 
pear at intervals until 1914. No revision of the original thesis has been 
made necessary by them, but they have gone far to confirm the attitude 
which was taken at the start ; for the whole purport of this study was 
to trace the development of Emerson's thought and to find how far the 
ideas to which he gives a fragmentary and poetic rendering are consist- 
ent parts of a larger theory. It has always been known that it was Emer- 
son's custom to make use in his essays and addresses of ideas which he 
had jotted down in his note-books years before ; the publication of these 
note-books reveals just how and when the idea first came into his mind. 
But inasmuch as these ideas have received a more perfect expression in 
the essays and addresses, it has seldom been found necessary or advis- 
able to quote from them ; and since there has been little of importance 
concerning Emerson's philosophy published since 1904, the essay as now 
set forth stands practically as it originally did through Chapter VLI. 
References to the Journals here and there, as well as to Mr. Goddard's 
Studies in New England Transcendentalism, Mr. Firkins' Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, and Professor Woodbridge Riley's American Thought, with 
some other contributions to the subject made since this essay was first 
written, have been added without changing more than the immediate 
context. 

References to the works of Emerson are to the paging of the Riv- 
erside edition, since the thesis was written before the Centenary edition 
was completed ; but the notes of Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, as well 
as the additional matter included in the later edition, have been read in 
connection with the Journals for this revision of the essay. 

After so many years I still remember with gratitude the friendly 

[S] 



6 EMERSON 

assistance j^iven me by Professor Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, under 
whose direction the thesis was prepared ; that it has so many rhetorical 
as well as philosophical shortcomings is due largely to the fact that it 
had to be written for the most part without his personal guidance. 
My thanks are due also to Professor Warner Fite of Indiana University, 
to Professor Killis Campbell of the University of Texas, to Professor 
John Erskine of Columbia University, and to Professor H. W. Stuart of 
Leland Stanford Junior University, for friendly criticisms and sugges- 
tions. There are, as always, other obligations not the less appreciated 
because not publicly acknowledged. 

H. D. G. 
Stanford University, May 191 7. 



EMERSON 



A Statement of New England Transcendentalism 

AS EXPRESSED IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
ITS CHIEF EXPONENT 



INTRODUCTION 

The term "New England Transcendentalism" is applied, first, to the 
various phases of idealism which found expression in New England 
during, roughly, the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But an 
examination of the attitude of that group of men who are recognized 
as the New England Transcendentalists soon reveals the fact that they 
themselves were not primarily concerned with philosophy for its own 
sake, but imported and modified the thought of Plato, of the Neo- 
Piatonists and Mystics, or of Kant and his successors, merely as a basis 
for their attitude toward religion and conduct ; that they thought of 
Transcendentalism not only as a philosophy but as a "movement" ; that 
however they might differ in theory, they were Transcendentalists by 
virtue of a common impulse. "This spirit of the time," says Emerson in 
his manifesto in the opening number of The Dial, "is in every form a 
protest against usage, and a search for principles."^ This is a second 
meaning of the term "New England Transcendentalism." A third mean- 
ing, which has been the source of much confusion, may be summed up 
in the phrase "Transcendental nonsense." The Transcendental move- 
ment was attended by a general spirit of unrest and hostility to convention. 
Whims and absurdities of all sorts were in the air. "Bran had its 
prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs," writes 
Lowell, in his delightful essay on Thoreau. "Everybody had a mission 
(with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. No brain but 
had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons 
sometimes." And in the same spirit Hawthorne, in his American Note- 
Books, speaks of Margaret Fuller's refractory cow at Brook Farm as a 
"transcendental heifer." The name New England Transcendentalism 
has been applied to cover all the wild vagaries of the time. 



1 "The Editors to the Reader," Dial, I, 3. 



8 EMERSON 

There was some excuse for this. The first announcements of Tran- 
scendentaUsm - were incomprehensible, and hence an immediate source 
of mirth, to ''ordinary" and "sensible" people ; an abstruseness of utter- 
ance was so often combined with eccentricity of conduct that it was easy 
to laugh at both of them together.^ Even the scholarly and the learned 
were bewildered by the first writings of Emerson * and Alcott ; and of 
the latter, at least, the absurd side, both in the "Orphic Sayings" and in 
the Fruitlands venture, is still quite apparent. "I was given to under- 
stand," says Dickens in his American Notes, "that whatever was unin- 
telligible would be certainly Transcendental." ^ "Transcendentalism" 
was the name applied to whatever lay beyond the realm of common 
sense, whether in thought, language, or behavior.*^ 

The connection between the half-mad representatives of what they 
called "The Newness" and the more serious exponents of Transcendent- 
alism proper was so close that it is hard to know where to draw the line. 
Emerson himself, the most conspicuously sane man among them all, was 
thought mad in the first extreme expression of his individualism, and the 
most foolish of his associates had, or thought he had, his own peculiar 
variation of the "intuitional philosophy." It is impossible to set up some 
arbitrary standard of sense and sanity, and say that whoever fell below 
this standard was not a transcendentalist. It is better to admit frankly 
that all three meanings of the term are quite legitimate provided that no 
one meaning is used to the exclusion of the other two ; that New 
England Transcendentalism had its philosophic side, which in Emerson 



2 I use the word always as referring to New England Transcendentalism. 

3 As, for example, in such a man as Charles Newcomb, not to mention others. 
One need not be a philistine for failing to take such a man with perfect sobriety. 
"Emerson was convinced that Newcomb's remarkable subtlety of mind amounted to 
genius," says Lindsay Swift {Brook Farm, p. 199), and proceeds to quote a sen- 
tence from "Dolon," which appeared in The Dial, as showing "if not genius, its 
next of kin." Newcomb's absurdities of conduct were also famous. 

* Holmes compares Professor Francis Bowen reviewing Emerson's Nature, to 
"a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box tortoise." There is more 
than humor in this ; yet Bowen showed more comprehension of Transcendentalism 
than any other critic on the "outside." 

5 The members of the group were of course conscious of their reputation. "I 
should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist," says Thoreau. 
"That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not under- 
stand my explanations." Journal, V, 4. 

6 Emerson breaks into delicious raillery when speaking of the whims and 
oddities of some of his associates ; while two such good trans«endentalists as James 
Freeman Clarke and C. P. Cranch illustrated Emerson himself with humorous 
drawings for their own amusement. See G. W. Cooke, "Contributors to The 
Dial," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, XIX, 236. 



INTRODUCTION ^ 

at least found a worthy and noble expression ; that primarily it was a 
movement in religion, literature, and conduct ; and that its camp followers 
were disproportionately numerous and noisy. 

Though the distinction between the philosophical and practical sides 
of New England Transcendentalism was made by Noah Porter as early 
as 1842,'^ this distinction was never recognized by its adherents, and has 
seldom been taken into account by its critics. We find Transcendental- 
ism described now as a philosophy,^ now as an expression of religious 
faith, ^ and again as a wave of reform. ^° Frothingham, who has written 
the history of the movement from the standpoint of a sympathizer and 
former adherent, defines Transcendentalism from all three points of 
view without making the least distinction in his use of the term: "Tran- 
scendentalism was a distinct philosophical system. Practically it was an 
assertion of the inalienable worth of man ; theoretically it was an as- 
sertion of the immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of 
supernatural attributes to the natural constitution of mankind." Again, 
"Transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy. It is more 
justly regarded as a gospel. As a philosophy it is ... so far from uni- 
form in its structure, that it may rather be considered several systems 
than one." And yet again, "Transcendentalism was ... an enthusiasm, 
a wave of sentiment, a breath of mind."^^ 

But even the sum of all these views of Transcendentalism does not 
exhaust its content. A philosophy, a gospel, a wave of sentiment, — 
Transcendentalism was also a challenge. "The problem of transcend- 
ental philosophy," says Theodore Parker, "is no less than this, to revise 
the experience of mankind and try its teachings by the nature of man- 



'■ "The word Transcendentalism, as used at the present day, has two applica- 
tions, one of which is popular and indefinite, the other, philosophical and precise. 
In the former sense it describes men, rather than opinions, since it is freely ex- 
tended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse from each other, but directly 
opposed." Bib. Rcpos., Second Series, VIII, 195. 

8 "Transcendentalism ... is the recognition in man of the capacity of know- 
ing truth intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order of existence 
transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible ex- 
perience." Dial, II, 90. Attributed by Cooke to J. A. Saxton. 

^ Literally, a passing beyond all media in the approach to the Deity, Tran- 
scendentalism contained an effort to establish, mainly by a discipline of the in- 
tuitive faculty, direct intercourse between the soul and God." Charles J. Wood- 
bury: Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. no. 

1^ Transcendentalism was not . . . speculative, but essentially practical and 
reformatory." John Orr : "The Transcendentalism of New England." Intcrnat. 
R., XIII, 390. 

11 Transcendentalism in New England, pp. 136, 302, and 355. 



10 EMERSON 

kind ; to test ethics by conscience, science by reason ; to try the creeds- 
of the churches, the constitutions of the states, by the constitution of the 
universe." ^^ It was because they felt that the "intuitional philosophy" 
gave them full warrant for such extravangant claims that the adherents 
of Transcendentalism so eagerly embraced it. As a challenge it was re- 
ceived by its opponents ; and because so many on each side were clergy- 
men, much of the earlier discussion of Transcendentalism took the form 
of religious controversy. Thus to Emerson's Divinity School address 
Andrews Norton answered with his "Latest Form of Infidelity," and to 
this again Ripley replied. The Dial set forth the claims of Transcendent- 
alism as an outgrowth of Unitarianism and at the same time an attack 
upon its fundamental principles, ^^ while the Princeton Review and the 
Christian Examiner alike warned their readers against it.^'* The Uni- 
tarians opposed the new movement with especial persistence because here 
it was internal dissension and civil war. 

But it was mere blindness in the Unitarians not to see that Tran- 
scendentalism and the abolishment of creed were inherent in the very 
creed to which they clung. Unitarianism was essentially an assertion of 
the divinity of human nature, and hence of the ability of the soul to rec- 
ognize religious truths independently of authority. But in maintaining 
this the Unitarians felt themselves to be true adherents of the church. 
They felt that the Protestant church was founded on the right of pri- 
vate judgment as superior to ecclesiastical tradition; that Christianity, 
Protestantism, and Unitarianism were successive revolts proceeding from 
exactly the same principle, each group of "come-outers" having the same 
noble heresy that had been the corner-stone of the church from which 



12 Lecture on Transcendentalism. Works, Centenary Edition, VI, 2>7- 

13 "This movement grew out of the Unitarian movement. It did not, how- 
ever, grow out of the Unitarian theology. . . . The association is, philosophically 
speaking, purely accidental." Dial, I, 421. Attributed by Cooke to W. D. Wilson. 
The tone of the article is openly hostile to the current orthodox Unitarianism. 

1* "We feel it to be a solemn duty to warn our readers, and in our measure, 
the public, against this German atheism, which the spirit of darkness is employing 
ministers of the gospel to smuggle in among us under false pretenses." Princeton 
Review, XII, 71. By Charles Hodge, the "founder, editor, and principal contrib- 
utor." (See Index Volume.) The Princeton Review was the orthodox Presby- 
terian organ. 

"We have no taste for the sublimated atheism of Fichte, or the downright 
pantheism of Schelling. Yet the^ are men familiar with the works of such 
authors, and loud in their praise, who are not ashamed to charge the philosophy of 
Locke with a sensualizing and degrading influence." Christian Examiner, XXIII, 
181. By F[rancis] BCowenl. The Christian Examiner was the Unitarian organ, 
but was already inclining toward the more liberal wing. 



INTRODUCTION 11 

they withdrew before it developed a creed and an authority of its own. 
Channing, who led the revolt from Congregationalism, saw the love of 
creed and authority at work again and said sadly, "We have a Unitarian 
orthodoxy." From this "orthodoxy" Transcendentalism was the next 
revolt ;^^ but although at first it took some members out of the church, 
in the end it triumphed within the church ; and the Unitarians today are 
much more the followers of Emerson and Parker than of their bitter aud 
forgotten antagonists. However much more it may have been, Tran- 
scendentalism was a development in the history of the Unitarian church. 

So important is the religious aspect of Transcendentalism that one is 
sometimes tempted to regard it not only as fundamental but as all-in- 
clusive. It should be remembered, however, that no history of American 
literature or of American social progress could be written without taking- 
account of the Transcendental movement. But it is beyond the purpose 
of this essay to consider Transcendentalism from any of these points of 
view. Our purpose is merely to frame a working definition as a basis 
for a consideration of Emerson's philosophy; and it has seemed best to 
bring together such statements as have hitherto been made, so far as they 
do not merely repeat one another, before venturing on any further at- 
tempt at a definition. In the various quotations thus far set down. Tran- 
scendentalism has been described from several apparently unrelated 
points of view. It is to be noted, however, that it is not so much the sum 
of all these various things as it is their product. It is one thing, and not 
many things. What gives New England Transcendentalism such im- 
portance as it has in the history of philosophy is simply that its philos- 
ophy is a consistent part of a larger whole. 

Turning now to what this philosophy actually was, we find again a 
considerable variety of opinion. Some will have it that there was no 
philosophic content at all to New England Transcendentalism; while 
some express the fundamental principles with the greatest vagueness 
and indefiniteness, and others with absolute precision. What M^ere the 
essential ideas upon which all the New England Transcendentalists were 
agreed? Was the diversity of opinion of the various members of the 
so-called "Transcendental Club" so great as to prevent their forming, in 
a modest way, a school of philosophy? And is there anything distinctive 
in New England Transcendentalism to separate it from the greater sys- 
tems upon which it was founded? 

The "fundamentals of Transcendentalism," says Cabot, "are to be 



15 Brownson, one of the most remarkable men of the group, felt the inevitable 
logic of this sequence ; and thus, after he became a Romanist, he devoted a special 
essay to the thesis that "Protestantism ends in Transcendentalism." Essays, p. 209. 



12 EMERSON 

felt as sentiments, or grasped by the imagination as poetic wholes, rather 
than set down in propositions" ;^*^ and Frances Tiffany, in one of the best 
definitions thus far formulated, says, "First and foremost, it can only be 
rightly conceived as an intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual ferment, not 
a strictly reasoned doctrine. It was a Renaissance of conscious, living 
faith in the power of reason, in the reality of spiritual insight, in the 
privilege, beauty, and glory of life." ^"^ The utmost vagueness as to the 
philosophic content of Transcendentalism is to be found in the always 
quoted passages from Emerson's lecture on "The Transcendentalist," ^® 
and here and there in his Journals ;^^ while Theodore Parker, on the other 
hand, who was to Emerson, in a way, what Ben Jonson was to Shake- 
speare, defines with scholarly exactitude while he misses the poetic large- 
ness, the Gothic suggestiveness and freedom.^" No account of the Tran- 
scendental philosophy could be more satisfactory and less adequate than 
Parker's. It leaves nothing distinctive, nothing original. The very 
harmlessness and sanity of his statement is what makes it false. 

Where the two leading exponents of the school take such divergent 
views, it seems at first more than hazardous to attempt to say what posi- 
tion they all held in common, or even to assert that they were united by 
more than a personal friendship and "a common impatience of routine 
thinking." ~^ But the writings of the various members of the group re- 



1** /i Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I, 248. 

1'^ "Transcendentalism : The New England Renaissance," Unitar. R., XXXI, 
III. 

^s "Transcendentalism is . . . Idealism as it appears in 1842. . . . The Tran- 
scendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. ... If there is 
anything grand or daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the 
unknown ; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as 
most in nature. The oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism 
is an expression of it. The Buddhist ... is a Transcendentalist. . . . Shall we 
say then that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith ; the presenti- 
ment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect 
obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish?" Works, I, 317-320. 

19 In the lecture quoted above, Emerson refers to Kant's "transcendental 
forms" as a basis for New England Transcendentalism ; but in his Journal he is 
more independent. Let one not consult the Germans, he says, but omit in his own 
mind what is added from tradition, "and the rest will be Transcendentalism." 
(Vol. VI, p. 380.) 

2° "That there is in the intellect (or consciousness), something that never 
was in the senses, to wit, the intellect (or consciousness) itself; that man has 
faculties which transcend the senses ; faculties which give him ideas and intuitions 
that transcend sensational experiences ; ideas whose origin is not from sense, nor 
their proof from sense." Op. cit., p. 23. 

21 Cabot, I, 249. "We called ourselves the club of the like-minded, I suppose 
because no two of us thought alike," said James Freeman Clarke. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

veal distinctly more than this. Let me attempt a brief statement of what 
they held in common. 

As a group, or "school," the New England Transcendentalists 
thought, at least at the start, that they were followers of Kant 
in accepting a distinction between the reason and the understand- 
ing, and in attributing to the former the power of knowing truth di- 
rectly. ^^ Later, as they acquired some familiarity with other idealistic 
philosophies, they diverged somewhat in their thinking ; but they all 
remained consistent in their belief that the world of spirit (or of some 
super-spiritual substance) was the groundwork of being and the material 
universe an appearance or effect ; and that as the soul partook of the 
nature of God it had, through its highest quality as "reason," direct per- 
ception of reality. Beyond this, some members of the group did not care 
to venture. 

So much of theory held in common would not entitle the New 
England Transcendentalists to any separate consideration in the history 
of philosophy. But these men were not content to let their newly ac- 
quired idealism remain sterile. As they had come to accept it because of 
its imaginative and emotional appeal, so they applied it with enthusiasm 
and vigor to the problems of actual life ; and in doing this they felt that 
they were making a distinct forward step. Their attitude is well ex- 
pressed in an anonymous contemporary dialogue. Mr. A, in endeavor- 
ing to explain his beliefs to Mr. B, remarks, "The Transcendentalists of 
our country . . . have made great advances upon the Kantean philos- 
ophy; we have . . . made it bear more directly upon the duties and 
relations of life." -^ It was their emphasis upon this practical applica- 
tion of their philosophy that has led so many of their critics to lose sight 
of their philosophy altogether.^* 

But it was not that the New England Transcendentalists applied 
their idealism in religion and conduct ; it is rather that they took as a 



22 As early as 1839 this mistake was pointed out by one of the most vigorous 
critics of the time, the Rev. James Waddel Alexander, who remarked that Kant 
"simply meant to attribute to pure reason the power of directing the cognitive en- 
ergy beyond its nearer objects, and to extend its research indefinitely; but by no 
means to challenge for this power the direct intuition of the absolute, as the ver- 
itable object of infallible insight," as is done "by some of our American imitators." 
Princ. R., XI, 49. 

23 New Englander, I, 503. 

2* "It was a temper rather than a theory, an aspiration rather than a phil- 
osophy." W. M. Payne, Leading American Essayists, p. 187. This is the general, 
somewhat patronizing attitude which the average writer on the subject is wont to 
take. 



14 EMERSON 

test of idealism its practicability, that makes their distinctive contribution 
to philosophy. They asked of Transcendentalism not so much the age- 
old query, "Does it explain?" as the great modern question, "Does it 
work?'' Philosophy that did not prove itself by this test had no war- 
rant with them. The Transcendentalism of these men was a Pragmatic 
Mysticism. This of course did not imply that their system should be 
built up from such merely apparent things as facts. The data of ex- 
perience had already been discredited as the stuff out of which the sen- 
sationalism of Locke was constructed.-^ No; that idealism was en- 
nobling was its sufficient proof ; that sensationalism was degrading in its 
influence was a complete refutation of John Locke. 

For this emphasis on the practical and the moral. New England 
Transcendentalism was of course indebted to a Puritan inheritance.-" 
In this, as in many other things, it was emphatically an American 
product, and could not have found its complete expression in any other 
land. Hecker, who was closely associated with the group at Brook Farm 
before he became a Romanist, contends very ably that Transcendental- 
ism was merely an outgrowth of American Democracy ;-' and though he 
seems to forget that our democratic government and institutions were 
the result of religious freedom and not its cause, yet it is unquestion- 
ably true that without the aid of our political freedom this extreme ex- 
pression of religious liberty could never have taken place. This local 
and particular character of Transcendentalism was realized at the time. 
Dickens, in his American Notes, says, *Tf I were a Bostonian, I think I 
would be a Transcendentahst." Ordinarily one's philosophy does not 
depend upon his habitat. 

These, then, are the elements of which New England Transcendent- 
ahsm was composed; and no definition would be complete that did not 
take account of all of them. Such a definition would be cumbersome and 
ungainly. Let us say, then, simply, that New England Transcendental- 
ism was produced by the deliberate importing of certain imperfectly un- 
derstood elements of German idealism into American Unitarianism ; that 
it became a creative force in American life and letters; but that as a 
philosophy it was merely a sort of mystical idealism built on pragmatic 



25 When Hedge was told that the facts were against him, he replied, "So 
much the worse for the facts." Bartol : Radical Problems, p. 70. 

20 Transcendentalism, as embodied in its leaders, Alcott, Emerson, Parker, 
and Margaret Fuller, was— whatever else as well— "a blending of Platonic meta- 
physics and the Puritan spirit, of a philosophy and a character . . . taking place 
at a definite time, in a specially fertilized soil, under particular conditions." H. C. 
Goddard: Studies in Nczv England Transcendentalism, pp. 189 and 196. 

27 Catholic World, XXIII, 534- 



INTRODUCTION 15 

premises. This skeleton of a definition, if read in connection with the 
twenty representative comments I have quoted, will at least serve as a 
basis on which we may consider the philosophy of Emerson. 

To attempt a statement of what Emerson's philosophy really was is 
a task as difficult as it is thankless. We have long- been accustomed not 
only to rejecting- him wholly as a philosopher, but also to placing upon 
him certain other values with which the establishment of a philosophical 
claim would interfere. The estimate which I have been forced to take 
of Emerson's contribution to philosophy far exceeds that which is usually 
put upon it ; and though this may easily be due to the importance which 
a subject is wont to take upon near examination, yet I find that opinion 
in the scholarly world has grown rapidly of late years in this same di- 
rection. It is time that the main tenets of New England Transcendent- 
alism received a definite philosophical statement ; and these, without 
question, may best be noted in the central figure of the group. For 
whatever the value of Emerson's thought may have been, it is almost 
beyond dispute that there is no independent value in the philosophical 
aspirations of his associates. 

Emerson bears much the same relation to the Transcendentalists of 
New England as Socrates bore to the Sophists of Athens : he was dis- 
tinctly one of them, yet distinctly apart from the rest. Like Socrates, he 
had no system of philosophy to support ; and like him, again, the results 
of his teaching were not theories but men. Or, to bring the comparison 
nearer, Emerson stands in much the same relation to the philosophy and 
religion of the nineteenth century as Jonathan Edwards, born just one 
hundred years before him, stands to the philosophy and religion of the 
eighteenth. These two men represent the extreme expression of their 
respective times. Each was a pure idealist, though neither was original 
in his system-making ; both were men of high character and of great 
moral earnestness. Their vast difference of attitude is the concrete ex- 
pression of the difference between Puritanism and Unitarianism. 

The period of Transcendentalism in New England may be said to 
begin with the publication of Emerson's Nature in 1836. It is true that 
the "stir" was felt much earlier. Unitarianism entered into a new period 
of life and activity about 181 5, with Channing and Walker as its leaders ; 
and so clearly did these men foreshadow the later developments that 
they have sometimes, but without sufficient warrant, been counted as 
Transcendentalists. The first importation of the essential German con- 
tribution came with the return from Gottingen of Bancroft, Everett, and 
Ticknor ; and one critic accordingly begins the period of Transcendent- 



16 EMERSON 

alism "about 1820." ^^ But the first genuine interest in German philos- 
ophy did not come with these men, but through EngUsh and French 
sources — through Coleridge and Cousin — and was not felt in New 
England till after 1830. The direct and purposeful engrafting of Ger- 
man idealism upon American Unitarianism, by which New England 
Transcendentalism was really created, that is, the formation of the 
"Transcendental Club," took place in the very year that Emerson's 
Nature gave to it its first real utterance. And it was in this same year 
that the American edition of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus brought to a head 
the growing spirit of unrest."" With Emerson's Nature Transcendent- 
alism found its first adequate expression not only in philosophy but in 
literature ;^° and it is accordingly from 1836 that Higginson and others 
have dated the beginning of a genuine and distinctive American litera- 
ture. 

It is less easy to fix upon a date, like "the closing of the theatres in 
1642," which will conveniently mark the end of the period. We might 
well choose the publication of Emerson's Second Series of Essays and of 
the last number of The Dial in 1844,^^ though Judd's Margaret, the one 
distinctive piece of Transcendental fiction, was not published till the fol- 
lowing year, and the experiment at Brook Farm lasted two years longer. 
Or we might, with more liberality, bring down the period of Tran- 
scendentalism to the death of Thoreau in 1862, by which time Parker and 
Margaret Fuller had also died, and Emerson's Conduct of Life had vir- 
tually completed his contribution. Even this would not include the work 
of such younger but thorough-going Transcendentalists as Higginson and 
Sanborn; while the publication of the first book of the originator of the 
"Transcendental Club" did not occur till 1865.^^ Goblet d'Alviella, em- 



28 F. C. Lockwood : Emerson as a Philosopher, p. 3. 

29 "This was the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny," says Lowell, 
in his essay on Thoreau ; and John Orr dates the Transcendental movement not 
from Emerson's book but from Carlyle's in the same year. 

30 The first important books of Alcott and of Ripley appeared also in 1836, 
and no other member of the group had published anything of consequence before 
this. 

31 The Dial contained representative work from all the leading members of 
the group: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing (the poet), Thoreau, 
Parker, and Cranch were fully and adequately represented ; while less frequent con- 
tributions were received from Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, W. H. Channing, 
Dwight, Ripley, Hedge, and Jones Very. Many of the less famous members are also 
included. Between 1836 and 1844 books were published by Emerson, Alcott, Par- 
ker, Margaret Fuller, Ripley, Clarke, Cranch, Ellery Channing, and Jones Very. 
Thoreau's first book was not published till 1849. 

82 Hedge's Reason in Religion. 



INTRODUCTION 17 

phasizing the practical and reformatory aspect of Transcendentalism, ex- 
tends the period to include the Civil War.^^ It seems to me, however, 
that the publication of Emerson's Poems, and the breaking up of the 
Brook Farm experiment, in 1847, should be taken as more appropriately 
marking the close of the period than any of these later events, coming, 
as they did, when Transcendentalism had already become a declining 
rather than a growing force. Nothing essentially characteristic was 
added after Emerson's philosophy appeared again in the form of poetry; 
and the failure of Brook Farm marks the close of the second of the two 
notable undertakings which originated in the "Transcendental Club." 
The Dial, as I have said, was already suspended. I venture, therefore, 
to name the years 1836 to 1847 as those we should accept in marking out 
the period of New England Transcendentalism. 

The development of American Unitarianism to the point where it 
could furnish a proper soil for Transcendentalism is best told in con- 
nection with the life and influence of William EUery Channing; the in- 
troduction or rather domesticating of German philosophy, which brought 
New England Transcendentalism itself into being, was the work, mainly, 
of Frederick Henry Hedge. 

^^Contemporary Evolution of Religious Thought, pp. 176 f. 



18 EMERSON 



CHAPTER I. 

Beginnings of New England Transcendentalism : Ciianning and 

THE Unitarian Movement; Hedge and the 

"Transcendental Club." 

William Ellery Channing- was born in the year 1780. It is not a 
little remarkable that the decade of his birth should have been thai 
which not only witnessed the birth of Unitarianism in this country, but 
which marked the beginning- of those three great movements in Germany, 
England, and France which were the determining factors of the Tran- 
scendental movement of New England. I mean, of course, the remark- 
able development of German idealism dating from the publication of 
Kant's Critique in 1781 ; the rise of English Romanticism heralded by 
the appearance of the songs of Burns in 1786; and the political an;! 
social revolutions which began in France with the fall of the Bastille in 
1789. It vv'as Channing's mission, more than that of any other man, to 
prepare the New England of Jonathan Edwards to become the New 
England of Emerson. 

Channing is the connecting link between these two men and their 
strangely dissimilar periods. It was only because he was firmly grounded 
in the old theology that he was able to lead almost the entire thinking 
population of Boston to a readiness to accept the new. He was ordained 
in Boston in 1803, the year of the birth of Emerson and of the death of 
Samuel Hopkins, who was the greatest of Edwards' disciples and the 
man who was both Channing's teacher and the immediate cause of his 
revolt from the Edwardian theology. From this date until the decided 
appearance of Emerson and Parker, Channing was the dominant in- 
fluence in American religious history. 

The story of his enlightenment is well known. While reading 
Hutcheson he came upon the sudden realization that if man is truly the 
child of God he must be free as God is free.^* Old as the thought was. 
it marked an epoch in our religious history. From this "discovery" 

3* If he deduced this from reading Hutcheson it must have been by his con- 
troversial instinct, for Hutcheson was a determinist. But this author's teaching of 
man's capacity for disinterested affection was quite in line with the thought of 
Hopkins, and consequently with Channing's habit of mind. This was probably the 
starting-point of his later thinking. 



CHANNING AND THE UNITARIAN MOVEMENT 19 

until he spoke his dying words, "I have received many messages from 
the Spirit," Channing stood for the freedom of the individual to think 
for himself in matters of religion. 

But so long as the assertion of the right of individual judgment 
meant no more than the ability of the soul to receive "these supernatural 
solicitings," it differed little from the faith of many religious persons of 
the past; for the experience which they interpreted as illumination h.as 
come to almost all sensitively constructed religious persons. The doc- 
trine of the "inner light" as taught by George Fox and the Quakers of 
this country, was an especially obnoxious heresy to the Puritans because 
it differed so little from their own beHef. But Channing's love of free- 
dom was closely bound up with the revolutions of France, and from this 
it received a certain breadth and motive power which enabled him to 
take a much firmer hold upon the children of the men who had engaged 
in the Boston Tea Party. ^^ As late as 1830 he was carried away with 
enthusiasm over the three days' revolution of July, and proportionately 
indignant at the general indifference in Boston. "I was a young man in 
college in the days of the first French Republic," he said, "and at every 
crisis in its history our dignity was wholly upset. We were rushing to 
meetings of sympathy or kindling bonfires of congratulation and walking 
in torchlight processions." On being called a young man for still show- 
ing this spirit, "he answered in a loud, ringing tone that was almost an 
hurrah, 'Always young for liberty!' " ^^ 

But the influence of Channing was the most important factor in 
bringing about the change of attitude which resulted in Transcendental- 
ism, not only because of his insistence upon the right of private judg- 
ment in matters of religion, nor even because he enforced this in the 
spirit of a staunch advocate of freedom; but because his strong literary 
sense and commanding eloquence supplied the motive power that was 
needed. No appeal was possible to the Boston to which Channing came 
but that which was made in the form of art. Channing appealed to that 
literary sense of largeness, of elevation, of profound suggestion which 

35 "This emphasis on the soul and its rights," says Mr. Daniel Dulany Ad- 
dison, speaking of Channing's belief in the worth of the individual man, "was in 
direct contrast to previous New England theological thinking and caused the re- 
pudiation of the teaching of Edwards and Hopkins. Channing was more under 
the influence of the writers of the French Revolution than the Puritan Fathers." 
(The Clergy in American Life and Letters, p. 200.) 

"** William W. Fenn, in Pioneers of Religious Liberty in America, p. 187. 
Given also, with slight variations, in the Life of William Ellcry Channing by his 
nephew, W. H. Channing, p. 601, Hedge's Martin Luther and Other Essays, p. 
170, and elsewhere. 



20 EMERSON 

England had been developing during her whole romantic movement. 
"Channing rose out of the reign of opinions into that of ideas," says 
James Freeman Clarke." Without being able to think profoundly for 
himself, he was fascinated, and in turn fascinated his hearers, with a 
certain breadth and elevation of thought. His purely literary articles, 
published between 1825 and 1830, are of importance because of the great 
impression which they produced.^* But in his familiarity with Words- 
worth and Coleridge, and in his love for them and more critical estimate 
of their associates, Channing had at least an appreciation of English 
Romanticism which was keen, and an expression of it in his own work 
which was adequate. 

If our estimate of the causes which produced Transcendentalism has 
been corect, and if Channing brought to American Unitarianism an ap- 
preciation of the French and English elements to the extent we have 
seen, then nothing remained but an acceptance of German Idealism to 
make him the first of the Transcendentalists. That he had some knowl- 
edge of German philosophy, even a large amount of sympathy with it, 
must be granted. "It was with intense delight," says his nephew, "that 
he made acquaintance with the master minds of Germany, through the 
medium, first of Madame de Stael, and afterwards of Coleridge." After 
speaking of his enthusiasm for Kant, Schelling, and Fichte, the biog- 
rapher adds : "Without adopting the systems of either of these philos- 
ophers, and, fortunately perhaps for him, without being fully acquainted 
with these systems, he yet received from their examples the most ani- 
mating incentives to follow out the paths of speculation into which his 
own mind had entered." ^^ 

Yet Channing was far from being a philosopher, and it was because 
of this lack that his religious inconsistencies gave way before the keen 
logic of Theodore Parker, and led to the ultimate triumph of Tran- 
scendentalism over the earlier Unitarianism.*" Channing had spoken 



37 Memorial and Biographical Sketches, p. 158. 

38 Mr. John White Chadwick apologizes for the taste of Channing's contem- 
poraries by calling attention to the state of American literature at this time. "But 
when Channing's articles appeared there was no such 'mob of gentlemen who write 
with ease' and write extremely well as we have now. Judged by purely literary 
standards, hundreds of these write better than Channing. But 'in the country of the 
blind, the one-eyed man is king,' and it is not strange that under the general con- 
ditions that prevailed from 1825 to 1830 Channing's literary product earned for 
him the enthusiastic admiration of his co-religionists and of many who were not 
joined to their assembly." (William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion, p. 

196.) 

39 Life of William Ellery Channing, by his nephew, W. H. Channing, p. 175. 
*o "He admitted the resurrection of Jesus," says Renan, "but not his divinity; 



BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM 21 

for the right of private judgment in rehgion, with the deep conviction of 
a great advocate of freedom, and with the lofty tone of a poet ; and in 
making the receptivity of the soul a universal attribute, though he had 
not himself enlarged it to a philosophy, he had at least created the need 
of a philosophical warrant for this old doctrine. 

This need was deeply felt and to some extent supplied by James 
Walker (1794-1874). The claims of this vigorous old theologian to 
some consideration in any treatment of the beginnings of Transcendent- 
alism in New England are so great that we may well consider whether in 
bringing a greater philosophical interest and knowledge to bear on the 
Unitarian position he was not indeed the first of the TranscendentaHsts. 

Walker was next to Channing the most important champion of the 
"Liberal" movement of 181 5. Like Channing he was impulsive and en- 
thusiastic in his youth, though there is little in the published sermons of 
either one to suggest that this could ever have been the case. As Pro- 
fessor of Moral Philosophy at Harvard, of which he was afterwards 
President, and as editor of the Christian Examiner, he had much to do 
with moulding the spirit of the age. 

Although Walker was a devout Christian, believing in the estab- 
lished means of grace and approving of philosophy only as serving the 
fends of religion, yet he had a strong grasp on the problems of philosophy 
and a deep interest in them ; so that he is often spoken of by his younger 
contemporaries as a metaphysician. But as Frothingham well points out, 
his mind seems to have been of an emphatically English cast, rather than 
German or French. And so, though he studied conscientiously the Ger- 
man philosophers from Kant to Hegel, as well as Cousin and Jouffroy, 
he did not fully enter into their spirit, nor find in them the spiritual ele- 
ment he wanted. His apparent reason, from his own English point of 
view, is expressed pithily in his remark, "Good sense must be ; other 
things may be, good sense must be ;" — a remark which must be read in 
the light of his later comment, "Men may put down Transcendentalism 
if they can, but they must first deign to comprehend its principles." 

Frothingham speaks of Walker as taking the Transcendental posi- 
tion out and out in 1834,'*^ two years before the date we have assigned 
to its first expression, and as evidence quotes from his once famous ser- 



he admitted the Bible but not hell." Channing tried to hold to both the divinity 
and humanity of Jesus; but why not, as Renan says, "frankly call him divine? It 
requires no more effort to believe one than the other." (£tudes d'Histoire Re- 
ligieuse, p. 378.) It was this central inconsistency that Parker perceived and con- 
demned. 

*^ Transcendentalism in New England, p. 120. 



22 EMERSON 

mon on "The Philosophy of Man's Spiritual Nature in regard to the 
Foundations of Faith." *- But in this sermon Walker was only endeavor- 
ing to establish "the existence and reality of the spiritual world" (his 
whole sentence is in italics), from "the acknowledged existence and real- 
ity of spiritual impressions or perceptions" ; and in order to state his 
point "in the simplest and clearest language of which the subject is 
susceptible," he explains, — "just as, from the acknowledged existence 
and reality of sensible impressions or perceptions, we may and do assume 
the existence and realities of the sensible world." ^^ This is quite the 
opposite of Transcendentalism. It is true that in this same sermon he 
expresses the hope for "a better philosophy than the degrading sen- 
sualism, out of which most forms of modern infidelity have grown 
... a philosophy which recognizes the higher nature of man . . . 
which comprehends the soul . . . which continually reminds us of our 
intimate relationship to the spiritual world." ** But though this was most 
valuable in determining the tendencies of the time, it is not the realiza- 
tion or presentation of Transcendentalism itself. Frothingham comes 
nearer to a just statement of Walker's position when he says, writing at 
a later time, that he transferred "the sanctions of authority from out- 
ward to inward, from external testimony to immediate consciousness, 
from the senses to the soul, as the deepest thinkers in all ages have done. 
. . . He attributed to the soul a receptive but not a creative power. "''^ 

German philosophy had been introduced into France by the 
Allemagne of Madame de Stael, and though this book had been some- 
what noticed and read both in this country and England, it received 
small notice in France till Cousin began to incorporate parts of it in his 
philosophy. Cousin's influence in America began when his Introduction 
to History of Philosophy was translated by H. G. Linberg and published 
in Boston in 1832, and more especially when, two years later, his History 
of Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, containing his vigorous criti- 
cism of Locke, was translated and published with an elaborate introduc- 
tion by Caleb Sprague Henry, under the title Elements of Psychology.*'^ 



*2 This sermon, printed in the Christian Examiner and republished as a tract,, 
may be found in Walker's volume of sermons entitled Reason, Faith and Duty. 

'^^ Reason, Faith and Duty, p. 39. 

** Ibid., pp. 60, 61. 

*^ Atlantic Monthly, LII, 18. 

**5 "Linberg's translation of Cousin's Introduction to History of Philosophy 
may be considered as the great store-house, from which most of them — e. g., 
Brownson, Emerson, Parker, &c. — have derived their peculiar philosophical opin- 
ions, their modes of reasoning, and their forms of thought and expression." 
American Church R., XIX, 411. 



HEDGE AND THE "TRANSCENDENTAL CLUB" 23 

But notable as was the influence of Cousin, that of Coleridge was 
certainly greater. In 1829 the Aids to Reflection was published with an 
introduction by James Marsh, who proposed Kant, Jacobi, the English 
Platonists, and Coleridge as a substitute for the current philosophy. In 

1833 Frederick Henry Hedge wrote a review of this book,*'^ and at once 
brought the contribution of Coleridge to a focus. This review was called 
by him later "the first word, as far as I know, which any American had 
uttered in respectful recognition of the claims of Transcendentalism." *^ 
It is Hedge's Unitarian point of view that gives this review its signif- 
icance for our study. Of Coleridge he writes : "He appears as a zealous 
Trinitarian and a warm defender of the doctrines of the English church. 
We have no doubt of his sincerity; but unless we err greatly he has 
either misunderstood his own views, or grossly misrepresented the doc- 
trines of his church." *'-^ 

But the personal influence of Hedge himself had, I believe, more to 
do with popularizing German philosophy in the transcendental group 
than had either the vague Coleridge or the glittering Cousin. Hedge had 
received his training in the German schools, and to a considerable extent 
he knew the mighty Germans in their own language. As minister at 
West Cambridge from 1829 till 1835, he came in contact with all the 
members of the group ; and during these formative years he seems to 
have made them fam.iliar with the main conceptions of Kant, Fichte, 
and Scheliing. Of Hegel, neither Hedge nor his friends knew very much, 
at this time or later. The influence of the German ideas, which Hedge 
was able to state with comparative correctness, in the daily conversation 
of intelligent and thoughtful men and women, is hard to estimate, and 
has been largely neglected because, of course, it was left unrecorded. In 

1834 Emerson wrote in his Journal, "Hedge read me good things out of 
Schleiermacher ;" ^° and a little later, "Coleridge loses . . . by his own 
concealing, uncandid acknowledgement of debt to Scheliing," ^^ which 
indicates that he now knew more of Scheliing than Coleridge had to teach 
him. Yet Cabot, who knew whereof he spoke, says, with reference 

^'^ Together with The Friend, republished at Burlington, Vermont, in 1831. 
Christian Examiner, XIV, 108. 

*8 Quoted by Mrs. Dall in her Transcendentalism in Nezv England, p. 15. In 
this review Hedge praises the work of Marsh; then, after commenting on Kant 
and Fichte, he considers Scheliing as "the most satisfactory." Coleridge he re- 
gards as a profound thinker, though not a successful poet. 

*9 Christian Examiner, XIV, 127. To Emerson, Coleridge's churchmanship 
was merely "a harmless freak." Journals, IV, 152. 

^^ Journals, III, 393. 

51 Journals, III, 503. 



24 EMERSON 

especially to Fichte and Schelling, "I had reason to believe that he had 
no first-hand acquaintance with the books." 

Hedge's own knowledg-e of German philosophy was by no means 
systematic or profound, and his influence would not have been so great 
if it had been. "This atmosphere, rather than any form and understand- 
ing merely, of German thought," says the editor of the Unitarian Review, 
"rather than any formal teaching of philosophy, — which he disbelieved 
in and kept aloof from, — made his characteristic service to our so-called 
'Transcendental' movement." ^- For Cabot's invaluable Memoir of 
Emerson, Hedge wrote an account of the origin of the "Transcendental 
Club," which shows how the influence of German philosophy was first 
brought to bear upon American Unitarianism: 

"In September, 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniver- 
sary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself, with 
one other,^^ chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion 
in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking very unsatis- 
factory. . . . What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning 
sensuous philosophy, dating from Locke, on which our Unitarian theol- 
ogy was based. The writings of Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh, and 
some of Carlyle's earlier essays, especially the 'Characteristics' and 
'Signs of the Times,' had created a ferment in the minds of some of the 
young clergy of that day. We four concluded to call a few like-minded 
seekers together on the following week. Some dozen of us met in Bos- 
ton, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. . . . These were the earliest 
of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for 
seven or eight years." 

sT^A Memory of Dr. Hedge" [By J. H. Allen], Unitar. R., XXXIV, 269. 
53 This was George Putnam. But he was not fully in sympathy with the 
movement, and did not attend after the first meeting. 



ATTITUDE AND METHOD 25 



CHAPTER II. 
Emerson: His Philosophical Attitude and Method. 

The life of Emerson has been so often told that it needs no restating. 
One hesitates to say again that "the blood of eight generations of min- 
isters flowed in his veins." But this is a most important thing to notice 
in any study of his philosophy. Emerson approached philosophy with a 
religious attitude. If one hesitates also to say again that after being 
ordained as a Unitarian minister in Boston in 1829, Emerson resigned 
his charge four years later because of his unwillingness to administer 
the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, and continued thenceforth, with the 
beauty and serenity of a great character, to announce from the lecture 
platform his inspiring spiritual perceptions, still it must not be forgotten 
that this was the other side of the same matter, — Emerson approached 
religion with the attitude of a philosopher. No philosophy was possible 
to him without its having a basis in religious instinct ; no religious faith 
or form could be accepted that had not its justification in the light of 
reason. In his mind the two were neither separate nor separable. 

If his attitude toward religion is the first thing to note in gaining a 
correct point of view for estimating Emerson's philosophy, his attitude 
toward practical conduct has also its importance in enabling us to read 
him with that sympathy which is essential to any sort of justice. Not 
philosophy for its own sake, but philosophy for its bearing on the life of 
men was ever in his eye, and it is on this account that he can be read 
without previous philosophical training. His ''practical idealism" was 
reflected most remarkably in his life. We could not think of Emerson 
as living in stateliness and ease, for his teachings of heroism, of pru- 
dence, of the homely virtues, would make this ridiculous ; nor yet as 
surrounded by scenes of embittering and debasing poverty, for his whole- 
some, ever-smiling optimism would then have been impossible, even to 
him. It is evident enough, also, that he could not have entered into the 
Brook Farm or Fruitlands experiments, for his shrewd Yankee sense 
glints forth at every turn ; nor yet could he have turned away coldly 
from such noble dreams of world regeneration, for his humor was ever 
more kindly than keen, his hopes always above his expectations. And 
so, again, Emerson could never join in the excited tumult of the Aboli- 



26 EMERSON 

tionists, for his soul was calm and his faith mighty ; yet the murder of 
Lovejoy and the desertion of Webster roused him to indignation. In all 
this we note a certain aloofness caused by his serenity, or his optimism, 
or that chilliness of temperament of which Margaret Fuller complained 
and to which he dolefully but blandly confessed ; and side by side with 
this we find a philosophy of which one of the main essentials was the 
dependence of pure thought upon practical conduct. 

It is not, however, its religious or its pragmatic aspects that have 
caused Emerson's philosophy to be charged with a fundamental ama- 
teurishness — if I may so say — a lack of system, of philosophical con- 
sistency, indeed of that logical soundness which is essential to an orig- 
inal thinker worthy of any serious consideration. There is no need to 
remind the philosophic world that Emerson was primarily a poet. Even, 
indeed especially, in his prose, it is ever the poet who is speaking. We 
have here just the reverse of those ancient philosophers who reasoned 
out their systems in the form of verse; we have the appearance of 
philosophy but the soul of poetry. The characteristic of the poet is en- 
thusias;n, which leads him, in his great delight over the discovery of any 
new truth to state it with the exaggeration which his high emotion leads 
him to assume. "Language overstates," says Emerson ( I, 190) ; and 
the freedom of his own prose form leads him to extreme overstatement. 
"I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye of abstract truth, 
and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that" (II, 309). 
The question must inevitably occur, Does Emerson remain a man of let- 
ters, merely, who dabbled in philosophy, or is he a philosopher who 
chose, as the mighty Plato himself had chosen, to reformulate the 
thoughts of his predecessors and give them an artistic rendering? 

No one who wished well by Emerson would press an analogy to 
Plato, whose greatness as a philosopher so easily transcended whatever 
limitations he may have had. But that Emerson had a right conception 
of philosophy, and worked at it not as a literary dilettante but with the 
seriousness of one deeply concerned with the problems themselves, must 
be recognized fully if we are to secure for our subject a fair hearing. 
So widespread is the belief that Emerson's inconsistencies are funda- 
mental, his want of logic and system a congenital defect, and hence his 
contribution to philosophy merely an imaginative restatement with some 
sort of mystical interpretation of various suggestive thinkers whom he 
had read at haphazard, that I may be pardoned for adding to my own 
conviction to the contrary the authority of some whose names cannot 
fail to give pause to those who have too hastily assumed the truth of 
these singular impeachments. 



ATTITUDE AND METHOD 27 

Not wholly singular, one must admit, since Emerson himself in cer- 
tain famous phrases has encouraged the belief. The "infinitely repellent 
particles" to which in playful modesty he compared his sentences in an 
often quoted letter to Carlyle. at once caught the popular imagination 
and comforted some who have found themselves on. a first reading" 
puzzled and annoyed. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little 
minds" (II, 58) is usually quoted without the word "foolish," and I 
have now and again heard this splendid manifesto of the truth-seeker 
turned against the philosopher. But it may be said that Emerson ex- 
pressly denied his ability to use "that systematic form which is reckoned 
essential in treating the science of the mind" (XII, 11 ), and that indeed 
he goes so far as to say, "The moment it [Logic] would appear as prop- 
ositions and have a separate value, it is worthless" (II, 507) ; and how 
can one claim standing as a system-maker who says naively, "I know 
better than to claim any completeness for the picture. I am a fragment, 
and this is a fragment of me" (III, 83), — "I simply experiment, an end- 
less seeker with no Past at my back" (II, 297) ? But all this, so far as 
it was not mere modesty, came from a wise caution, and an almost mor- 
bid horror of stifling truth by forcing it into set and definite terms. ^'' It 
was on this account that he could say so blandly to a doubting follov/er, 
"Very well ; I do not wish disciples" ; ^^ for I believe that Emerson 
would have felt the founding of a school an impeachment on his honesty 
— a closing of the windows that looked toward heaven. With all defer- 
ence to the mighty Kant, no phrase would have given him a keener pain 
than "Aber Er^erson sagt." It should be evident to anyone who feels 
competent to criticize Emerson's want of consistency and system that his 
own confession of it comes to no more than a perpetual openness of mind 
to receive nev^^ truth, coupled with a skeptical attitude toward the acquir- 
ing of definite results by too formal a method. But Emerson was no 
cheap radical, no mere iconoclast in his unsystematic method. 'T would 
gladly be moral," he comments by the way, "and keep due metes 
and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man ; 
but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter" (III, 71 ). And on 
honesty his heart was set no less in every chapter he wrote. 

But it soon became a tradition to consider Emerson from the point 
of vievv^ to which his confessions, or rather boasts, of inconsistency and 

^•' In this he anticipated Ibsen, who felt that a particularly vital truth might 
live for perhaps twenty years before becoming false! See An Enemy of the 
People. 

^^ Charles J. Woodbury's Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 60. 



28 EMERSON 

formlessness so easily laid him open. Lowell, whose picturesqueness of 
phrase often makes his merest witticism memorable, wrote in his essay 
on "Emerson the Lecturer" ^*^ of "a chaos full of shooting stars, a jumble 
of creative forces" ; and the poets and men of letters who have followed 
Lowell in judging Emerson have usually been impressed, as Lowell was, 
by the greatness of his mind and the imperfection of his sense of form, 
which latter they have rather assumed than proven kept Emerson from 
taking any place in the ranks of the real philosophers. Thus Holmes, in 
that delightful book on Emerson which has been called "the biography 
of a wood thrush by a canary bird," when the moment comes in which 
he should state the value of Emerson's thought contents himself with 
saying, "He was a man of intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a 
tendency to mysticism." ^^ And Woodberry, who disclaiming intellectual 
sympathy with Emerson can still say, "I feel in his work the presence of 
a great mind. His is the only great mind that America has produced in 
literature," ^^ still has it as his final verdict that Emerson is to be re- 
garded only as a poet. More outspoken, indeed overtly denunciatory, is 
Richard Garnett: "He could see, but he could not prove; he could an- 
nounce, but he could not argue. His intuitions were his sole guide ; 
what they revealed appeared to him self-evident ; the ordinary paths by 
which men arrive at conclusions were closed to him. To those in spir- 
itual sympathy with himself he is not only fascinating, but authorita- 
tive ; his words authenticate themselves by the response they awake in 
the breast. But the reader who will have reasons gets none, save reason 
to believe that the oracle is an imposition." ^^ Thus we s'?e that the tra- 
dition of Emerson's inability to reason in the manner of even an ordinary 
thinker is well established among his literary followers ; the same sort 
of criticism may still be found in such writers as Mr. Paul Elmore More 
(Shelbourne Essays) and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks (Americas Coming of 
Age). 

True, statements to this effect by more philosophic writers are not 
wanting, from the tirade evoked by the First Series of Essays in the 
Biblical Repository and Princeton Review ^^ to the dissertation of Mr. 



56 Works, I, 353. 

57 American Men of Letters : Emerson, p. 390. 

58 English Men of Letters : Emerson, p. 176. 

59 Great Writers : Emerson, p. 93. 

80 Vol. XIII, p. 539. The anonymous reviewer says that Emerson's is "the 
obscurity not of a deep but of a muddy stream, and the brilliancy of the surface 
is little else than the iridescence on a bowl of soap-bubbles. . . . From beginning 
to end there is a total absence of coherence and unity." 



ATTITUDE AND METHOD 29 

Charles M. Bakewell f^ and even Emerson's co-religionists have at times 
patronized or condoned.*'- 

But v^hile it would be "special pleading" and hence false pleading 
(on behalf of a man who would have scorned such friendly consolation 
with all the fervor of a Job) to deny the manifest inconsistencies of 
Emerson where occasionally they do occur, or bring in only the evidence 
of those who will testify that these inconsistencies are inconsequential and 
that Emerson's command of logic was not only real but of a high order, 
still I cannot but feel that these latter, both by the nature of their testi- 
mony and their right to judge, should have put this matter forever be- 
yond dispute. I shall mention merely in passing some of the literary 
and religious writers who have borne witness to Emerson's intellectual 
faculties, and then pass to those whose main interest is in philosophy, 
since they have here, surely, most right to speak. 

In a delightful account of how Emerson endeavored (and all in 
vain ) to induce him to abandon his peculiar type of verse, Walt Whit- 
man recounts:"'' "It was an argument-statement, reconnoitering, review, 
attack, and pressing home ( like an army corps in order, artillery, cav- 
alry, infantry) ... no judge's charge ever more complete or con- 
vincing." Passing over Mr. John Burroughs' obvious though generally 
neglected comment that certain of the essays "have more logical se- 
quence and evolution than certain others," "* let me refer only to the 
latest, as it is the best, of the statements by Emerson's more literary 
champions. Mr. O. W. Firkins in his recent delightfully written book 
devotes considerable space to a thorough-going defense of Emerson's 
very logic. His conclusion is : "Emerson, then, is disinclined to logic ; 
he does not care to be delayed or bored. But the folly of critics, encour- 
aged by a word of his own, has converted this disinclination into in- 
capacity." "^ Mr. Firkins cites various instances of Emerson's "consecu- 
tive and logical reasoning." 

81 "The Philosopliy of Emerson," Phil. R., XII, 530. I find nothing, however, 
in this essay which tends toward the establishment of the point in hand. 

^2 "He is not a logical writer," said the nothing-if-not-Iogical Theodore Par- 
ker, though as always the mere assertion is allowed to stand. "We must not 
expect a seer to be an organizer," says Bartol, "any more than ... an astronomer 
an engineer. We must supplement his calling, extend his vision, and perhaps cor- 
rect his view." 

83 Specimen Days, p. 172. 

64 Indoor Studies, p. 145. 

85 Firkins' Emerson, p. 299. This book is deserving of especial praise. Even 
the chapter on "Emerson's Philosophy" is excellent, though less satisfactory than 
the rest. It is curious that Mr. Firkins, who insists so strongly upon Emerson's 
consecutiveness and coherence, should be more inconsecutive and incoherent than 
Emerson himself in this crucial chapter. 



30 EMERSON 

If, for the sake of completeness, we were now to record the religious 
vote, we should find that there are abundant statements, both from 
friends and foes, to show that Emerson's analytical ability was fully rec- 
ognized. It will be sufficient if I cite a single comment from each camp. 
Says Edwin D. Mead: "This rare consistency and persistency is the ever 
notable thing in Emerson. It is the superficial man that finds and talks 
of inconsistencies in Emerson." *^^ And the Rev. S. Law Wilson writes : 
"In moments of simple insight and pure intuition a man does not employ 
the scholastic terms and philosophic distinctions that Emerson does. . . . 
Evidently the Seer brought down with him from his Watch-tower of 
Contemplation very little that he did not take up with him." ®^ 

Emerson's method is treated with most respect by his most scholarly 
critics. Professor Dewey says, in writing of Emerson as the "Philos- 
opher of Democracy," ^® "I am not acquainted with any writer, no matter 
how assured his position in treatises upon the history of philosophy, 
whose movement of thought is more compact and unified, nor one who 
combines more adequately diversity of intellectual attack with concen- 
tration of form and efl:ort." Professor Miinsterberg says that his sen- 
tences — those infinitely repellent particles — "are not only in harmony 
with each other, they are in deepest harmony with the spirit of modern 
philosophy." ^° Tyndall thought that "Emerson was a splendid mani- 
festation of reason in its most comprehensive form" ; and Grimm, more 
nearly than anyone else, has explained both how the impression of Emer- 
son's inconsecutiveness exists, and what is the attitude of those who de- 
fend him : "At first one can detect no plan, no order, and we seek won- 
deringly for the hidden connection of these sentences. . . . Soon, how- 
ever, we discover the deep underlying law according to which these 
thoughts are evolved, and the strict sequence." ^'^ And what that law 
is, is beautifully illustrated by Horace Mann in a letter quoted by Mr. 
Conway :" "As a man stationed in the sun would see all the planets 
moving around in one direction and in perfect harmony, while to an eye 
on the earth their motions are full of crossings and retrogressions, so he, 
from his central position in the spiritual world, discovers order and har- 
mony where others can discern only confusion and irregularity." Emer- 
son himself was as conscious of the underlying consistency of his think- 
ing as he was of its superficial discrepancies. Immediately after the pas- 



*'6 Genius and Character of Emerson, p. 236. 
6'^ The Theology of Modern Literature, p. 105. 
^s International Journal of Ethics, 1903, p. 405. 
^^ Harvard Psych. Studies, vol. II, p. 17. 
"^^ Essays on Literature, p. 25. 
'''^Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 149. 



ATTITUDE AND METHOD 31 

sage I referred to above (p. 27), where he admits that he cannot use 
"that systematic form which is reckoned essential in treating the science 
of the mind," he continues: "But if one can say so without arrogance, I 
might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting a fragmentary 
curve, recording only what facts he has observed, without attempting to 
arrange them within one outline, follows a system also, — a system as 
grand as any other. ... I confess to a little distrust of that complete- 
ness of S3^stem which metaphysicians are apt to affect" (XII, 11). 

It has seemed to me essential to state the case at this tiresome 
length because without a substantial agreement in this matter it is im- 
possible to consider Emerson's philosophy with that fundamental respect 
which is essential to any sort of justice ; and I have been forced to pre- 
sent as fairly as I could the consensus of opinion on the subject because 
it is not a matter for analysis or for argument. I may now only trust 
that anyone who may look through the statement that I am about to 
make of Emerson's philosophy v/ill do so with exactly the same attitude 
that he would if this were an introduction to the philosophy of Schelling. 

For it is to Schelling, of course, that Emerson is closest akin. Mr. 
John S. Harrison "^ throws the whole emphasis upon his reading of Plato 
and the Neo-Platonists, and Mr. Firkins concurs. Professor P^iley says 
that Emerson's "knowledge of German metaphysic was slight and sec- 
ondary" ;^^ and Cabot himself said definitely this same thing. On the 
other hand Mr. Lockwood claims the direct influence of Schelling,'^* and 
Mr. Goddard more guardedly and with more warrant speaks of the 
striking similarity between Emerson's thought and Coleridge's, and con- 
sequently between Emerson's and Schelling's, and shows successfully, it 
seems to me, that this was a more vitally stimulating if less continuous 
influence than that of Plato and the Neo-Platonists.'^^ 

But while Emerson was no doubt stimulated either directly by 
Schelling or indirectly through Coleridge, there can be no doubt that he 
was an original thinker, and arrived at his conclusions by very much the 
same methods as all other philosophers have done, however much he 
may have attributed a religious connotation to any new truth which he 
felt that he had acquired.^'' His purpose was not to make a system 



''-The Teachers of Emerson. New York: Sturgis and Walton, igio. 

''^America)! Thought, p. 159. 

''* Emerson as a Philosopher, pp. 6, 7. 

''^Studies in New England Transcendentalism, pp. 80, 81. 

7® "There can be no greater blunder," says Mr. John M. Robertson in his 
Modern Humanists (p. 120), "than to suppose that men who use the analytic 
method begin to get notions by analysing mechanically. The act of analysis is it- 
self a reaching forward identical in character with what Emerson called the secret 
-augury." 



32 EMERSON 

which would stand with or supplement the systems before him, but sim- 
ply to answer for himself those "obstinate questionings" with which we 
are all concerned in our deepest moments. It may be too much to say 
that Emerson would have arrived at just the same results if Schelling 
had not written ; but a man of Emerson's open-mindedness, so free with 
his quotations, so eager indeed to attribute his own ideas to other men, 
could never have announced his "discoveries" in the hesitating, awe- 
struck manner in which he gives them forth, if he had not thought them 
revealed to him in those sacred moments when he felt himself to be "part 
and parcel of God" (I, i6). The question of his indebtedness, therefore, 
seems to me to be of little moment. 

Here, then, is material for a system, — shall we say? — and if we can 
arrange it in some sort of order, that of itself may enable us to see more 
clearly what value it may have. So ordered and systematized it will doubt- 
less prove unsatisfactory ; but there may be some gain, — perhaps enough to 
compensate for the loss. But no one will claim for it finality, and Emer- 
son least of all. In the following chapter I shall attempt a statement of 
Emerson's answer to the question, "What is Reality?" Then I shall 
proceed to his answer to the question, "How is this explanation of Reality 
possible?" In recognizing the inconsistencies in his answer to this sec- 
ond question and in putting together the suggestions of what seems to 
me his final theory, I trust that I am not going farther than there is war- 
rant for in those passages which, though fragmentary and imperfect, still 
give us genuine suggestions of what he intended as his final word. In 
order to do this, it will often be necessary to translate him into the 
language of philosophy. But it is a thankless task to put Emerson's con- 
ceptions into the stifiF terms of the metaphysicians, and I shall endeavor 
to keep him as much as possible in his own beautiful "original." There 
is danger, also, with so vague and suggestive a writer, of reading into 
him the ideas in one's own mind ; therefore with no more comment than 
is needed, I shall allow him to speak for himself, and as often as what 
he says ofifers its own explanation. It shall be my attempt to think 
through the subject in what seems to me Emerson's own plan; but I 
shall attempt to arrange in some sort of logical order the various diffi- 
culties which presented themselves to his mind, and to state expressly 
the steps by which he seems to have arrived, sometimes unconsciously to 
himself, at his more significant "discoveries." In doing this I must crave 
some patience, especially at the outset of the following discussion, for 
the reiteration of much that is both obvious and as old as thought itself. 



NATURE, THE OVER-SOUL, AND THE INDIVIDUAL 33 



CHAPTER III. 

The Philosophy of Emerson: Nature, the Over-Soul, and the 

Individual. 

"A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself," writes Emerson in 
his first published work, "whether this end [Discipline] be not the Final 
Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists" (I, 52). 
The cause of this doubt is "my utter impotence to test the authenticity 
of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make 
on me correspond with outlying objects." In spite of its age and obvious- 
ness, this, as the starting point of Emerson's philosophy, is a point of 
view on which he always insists, and to which he never hesitates to 
recur. "The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure 
with all they report of" (VI, 295). "Souls never touch their objects. 
. . . Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. . . . 
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at 
least we shall find reality" (III, 52, 53). But though this is generally a 
matter of mood and impression, Emerson's conclusion is as sane as it is 
inevitable : there is no way of knowing what nature is, so, "Be it what 
it may, it is ideal to me so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my 
senses" (I, 53). 

But this does not affect the "stability of nature." The great reality 
is there, always ready for us to come to it when we will, and to interpret 
it and enjoy it as Nature (III, 53). Indeed it is our place to come more 
and more into association with Nature. In calling it "illusion" we do 
not afi:'ect its practical reality in the least. "We come to our own and 
make friends with matter, which the ambitious clatter of the schools 
would persuade us to despise. We can never part with it ; the mind 
loves its old home" (III, 165). "Whether nature enjoy a substantial ex- 
istence without, or is only the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful 
and alike venerable to me" (I, 53). 

Then if nature is illusion and its laws are permanent, what is the 
reality which imposes these laws? The answer is obvious. "It is the 
uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in 
the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote ; but to 
lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute 



34 EMERSON 

neces-^an- existence to spirit : to esteem nature as an accident and an 
ettect" {1. 54>. This is the second ob\nous point in Emerson's Idealism, 
and this also he is never weani^ of restating. "On this power, this all- 
dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and earth is laid. Nature is 
brute but as the soul quickens it ; Nature always the effect, mind the 
flowing cause" (XIII, 212). 

But this indiscriminate use of "spirit" and of "mind" as the cause 
of nature leads to the further question. Of what spirit or mind is nature 
the eftect ? The first answer seems to be that the source is purely human. 
"The Intellect builds the Universe and is the key to all it contains" (XII, 
4). "Ever>- law in nature, as gTa%"it\-. centripetence. repulsion, polarity-, 
imdulation. has a counterpart in the intellect" (^VIII, 211 ^ : and on this 
"perfect parallelism bet^veen the laws of Nature and the laws of thought" 
<^\T[I, 13 I is based this third development of Emerson's thinking ac- 
cording to the order in which I am trxing to arrange it. His statement 
of this position is very frequent. — sometimes rhetorical, sometimes ab- 
solute, and sometimes argumentative. "\\"hat if you shall come to 
realize that the play and the playgrotmd of all this pompous history- are 
radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams?'' ^VI, 
302'). "Man is always throwing his praise or blame on events, and does 
not see that he only is reaL and the world his mirror and echo" (X, 185). 
"AVe have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we 
have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which 
we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these sub- 
ject-lenses have a creative jx)wer: perhaps there are no objects. Once 
we hved in what we saw : now the rapaciousness of this new power, 
which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, 
letters, religion, objects, successively tumble in. and God is but one of its 
ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena: even.- e\i\ and 
ever}- good thing is a shadow which we cast" {111, jj ). 

But this is not the only, nor indeed the usual explanation which 
Emerson gives for the appearance and dependence of nature. "It is a 
sufnc:ent accoimt of that Appearance we call the World, that God will 
teach a himian mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain ntunber 
of congruent sensations, which we call sim and moon, man and woman, 
house and trade" (,I, S-^- Indeed it is the purpose of Emerson's first 
little book on Nature to discover back of Nature the imiversal soul 
which produces it. "Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And 
m?n in all ages and countries embodies it in his language as the Father" 
(I, 33 \ "Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of 
things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origfin. It always 



NATURK, THE OVER-SOUL, AND THE INDIVIDUAL 35 

speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It 
is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us" (I, 65). 

Thus it is not to the Fichtean side that Emerson inclines. Cabot 
says he had read Berkeley "in early youth," (p. 291) ; and he gives a let- 
ter to Margaret Fuller in which Emerson writes of "remembering the 
joy with which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berkeleyan 
philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of afterwards." ^^ But 
beyond this prejudice of his reading, we are forced to judge Emerson in 
this regard in the light of his natural attitude of mind. It has often been 
noted that it is largely a matter of temperament that one man holds to 
one system of philosophy and another to another. Certainly Idealism 
was a necessity to one of Emerson's nature, and just as certainly that 
form of Idealism which swamped the universal in the individual ego 
was impossible to him. His pages are full of the expression of his sense 
of the unimportance of his individual self in the great scheme of things. 
At times his statement of this seemingly contradictory point of view is 
characteristically extreme. "Nothing is of us. All is of God. The in- 
dividual is always mistaken" (III, 71). But for the most part he has a 
less impassioned argument to offer. "A little consideration of what 
takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than 
that of our will regulates events" (II, 132). "As with events, so with 
thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I sec 
not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; 
not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I de- 
sire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from 
some alien energy the visions come" (II, 252). 

This contradiction must be resolved before we can go further. If the 
individual soul creates what it observes, and "God is but one of its ideas," 
then it is not "from some alien energy the visions come." That both of 
these are misstatements because overstatements, is patent. No one who 
reads him will think of taking it as Emerson's actual belief either that 
God — the real God — is no more than an idea of man, or that the source 
of things is "alien" to the observer. Let this most undeniable instance of 
the unreality of his contradictions speak for many more. Emerson, as 
I said before, is not to be read too literally. Moreover, we have ex- 
aggerated his disconnectedness ; many of his statements are softened 
wonderfully when they are read in the tone of the essay in which they 
occur. And so perhaps the best way to allow Emerson to solve this 
seeming contradiction is to quote him while he makes it again and in the 
same breath. "It [the individual soul] feels that the grass grows and 

''"'A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. II, p. 478. 



36 EMERSON 

the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature." And 
immediately the explanation follows: "Behold, it saith, I am born into 
the great, the universal mind. ... I am somehow receptive of the great 
soul, and thereby do I overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to 
be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more 
the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and 
human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act 
with energies which are immortal. Thus . . . man will come to see that 
the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh" (II, 277). 

This, then, is the easy explanation. To say that the individual soul 
creates its objects and to say that God creates them is to say one and 
the same thing. "There is one mind common to all individual men. . . . 
Who hath access to this universal mind is party to all that is or can be 
done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. ... Of this universal 
mind each individual man is one more incarnation, all its properties con- 
sist in him" (II, 9, 10). It was this extreme expression of pantheism 
which brought such ridicule upon Emerson at the outset of his career. 
"I am a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of 
the Universal Being circulate through me ; I am part and parcel of God" 

(I, 16). 

But Emerson soon perceived a danger in this point of view. The 
individual who is "part and parcel of God" is no individual at all ; and 
at certain moments Emerson, like all the rest of us, felt his world of in- 
dividual persons and things disappearing in an all-absorbing Totality. 
"I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but . . . they melt so fast 
into each other it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. . . . But 
this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist. . . . She will not re- 
main orbed in a thought but rushes into persons" (III, 224). 

This brings us to the next and most important stage in Emerson's 
thinking. We have on the one hand "that overpowering reality," "that 
Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is con- 
tained and made one with all other" (II, 252), and to counterbalance this 
we have the statement that Nature "rushes into persons." Moreover, 
that these "persons" have the power of choice either to break the laws of 
Nature or to surrender themselves to the Universal Being is as funda- 
mental a belief with Emerson as is the existence of that "Eternal One" 
which, by being so, seems to preclude all independent individuality. In- 
deed, if reduced to a dilemma between his idealism and his belief in the 
freedom and integrity of the individual, Emerson would, I think, have 
held to the latter. 



NATURE, THE OVER-SOUL, AND THE INDIVIDUAL 37 

"For He that ruleth high and wise, 

Nor pauseth in his plan, 

Will take the sun out of the skies 

Ere freedom out of man" (IX, 174). 

It becomes his problem henceforth, as it is that of all Idealism, to give a 
reality, a certain degree of independence and initiative, to the individuals 
who live in a world of universal spirit. How he attempts to reconcile 
these opposing points of view we shall consider in the following chapter. 
But granting for the present that there is no final contradiction here, 
there is still a new difficulty in deciding how nature gets its permanence 
by its dependence upon the laws of mind. For if we once cease to be 
part of the spirit which is the cause of nature, our perception of nature 
must cease also ; by this arrangement the evil-minded man would needs 
be blind and insensible, whereas his perception of nature is as good as 
that of the most virtuous. '^^ This is a trivial objection, and one which 
Emerson never explained nor even noted, but it seems to me a necessary 
link in an attempt to give some completeness to his scheme. A sug- 
gestion of what his answer would have been is given, however, in a note 
in Emerson's Journal for Tune, 1835: 

"Our compound nature differences us from God, but our reason ^' 
is not to be distinguished from the Divine Essence. ... It [the Divine 
Essence] is in all men, even the worst, and constitutes them men. In 
bad men it is dormant, in the good efficient : but it is perfect and iden- 
tical in all, underneath the peculiarities, the vices, and the errors of the 
individual." 

This is to say, by implication at least, that man has a three-fold nature, — 
a mere sensory organism which as a part of nature never loses hold of 
the reality of which it is only an effect, like the lower forms from which 
it was evolved ; above this and springing from it, so to speak, into a cer- 
tain independence of thought and action, comes this "mediating" faculty, 
the understanding; and finally, ready to surrender its freedom and re- 
turn to the great reality from which it thus remotely came, is the reason. 



^8 Carlyle, with more of an impulsive snatching at a truth and less calm clear- 
sightedness than Emerson, is led astray at this very point. In Heroes and Hero- 
Worship he contends that "a thoroughly immoral man could not know anything" 
(Edition in Longman's English Classics, p. 104). 

''^ Under the immediate influence of Coleridge, Emerson is here distinguish- 
ing the reason from the understanding, which latter is the "executive faculty, the 
hand of the mind," which "mediates between the soul and inert matter," and 
"works in time and space." But this, written before his first independent venture 
in Transcendentalism proper, is merely an echo of German idealism, and does not 
bear the stamp of his own thinking. He continues, however, with this point of 
view, and gradually makes it his own. 



38 EMERSON 

But in all three of these developments, the great laws of nature con- 
tinue their sway, and thus are we allied at every stage to that from which 
we came. "The next lesson taught is the continuation of the inflexible 
law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will and thought. ... It is a 
short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of 
botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose sight 
of them" (VI, 209). 

These physical laws which extend their sway "into the subtile king- 
dom of will and thought" must be, of course, in their last analysis, the 
laws of spirit, and hence must be essentially moral. At the centre of 
being is that "moral force" of which "all force is the shadow or symbol" 
(III, III). In saying that Discipline may be the Final Cause of the Uni- 
verse, Emerson states this principle at the outset. From "Commodity" 
(that a man may be fed and in consequence that he may work) — to 
Beauty ("a nobler want of man") — to Language (nature "the symbol of 
spirit") — to Discipline, both of the Understanding and of the Reason 
(by which "the world becomes at last only a realized will" and all things 
become moral and "in their boundless changes have an unceasing refer- 
ence to spiritual nature" — Emerson traces the uses of nature in that first 
wonderful rhapsody which announced the whole gospel of Transcendent- 
alism. The uses of nature are ultimately moral because they culminate 
in this spiritual instruction of man, and "the secret of the illusoriness is 
the necessity of a succession of moods or objects" (HI, 58). "The moral 
law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is 
the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every pro- 
cess" (I, 47). That "the laws of nature are laws of mind" is then a dual 
fact; first, because spirit is the source from which nature and its laws 
originally proceeded, and, second, because the evolution of Nature back 
to spirit produces in its progress the individual human minds. That man 
is the "result and interpreter of nature" means that he is the result of 
this great process, and the interpreter of it as nature. To state these 
laws in order would give us then the main points of Emerson's philos- 
ophy. He himself does not enumerate them, but they might be arranged 
somewhat in this order : 

The first is the law of Permanence, by which we see that nature is 
not accidental, but a regular and orderly system, having its series of in- 
violable laws. 

The second is the law of Correspondence, which shows that the laws 
of Nature are really laws of spirit, that is, of the individual mind. 

The third is Universality, by which we know that the laws of my 
spirit are no other than the laws of all spirit, and that therefore I am 



NATURE, THE OVER-SOUL, AND THE INDIVIDUAL 39 

part of "the great, the universal mind," which is "common to all men" and 
which "constitutes them men." 

The fourth is Progress, which means that man is the "result" as well 
as the "interpreter" of nature. Here the individual emerges, asserting 
his claim to independence ; and he does so by "losing hold" of this cen- 
trality. He evolves on a tangent, so to speak, and knows nature from 
which he came, but not God, who caused it. 

And last there is the Moral Law, which underlies all these, and 
which shows that after all it is God at work, who must educate man 
through freedom. By this law, all nature exists for the education or 
"discipline" of man. Finally he returns, through self-surrender, to the 
great spirit from which he deviated. 



40 EMERSON 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Philosophy of Emerson (continued) : The Theories of Evo- 
lution AND Emanation. 

In spite of the patronizing tolerance in which it is usually held, the 
course of Emerson's thought, as we have just outlined it, would seem to 
one studying it sympathetically a fairly adequate putting together of 
various phases of Idealism, and a reasonably consistent reading of them 
as the main elements of a connected philosophy, if it were not for the 
central contradiction which has been reserved for discussion in this chap- 
ter. This seems a modest claim enough to make for it ; for the contra- 
diction is as fatal as one could very well be. Let us state once more, in 
Emerson's own words, this fundamental difficulty, and then proceed at 
once to his answer. "In the divine order. Intellect is primary, Nature 
secondary ; it is the memory of the mind. That which once existed in 
the intellect as pure law has now taken body as Nature" (I, i88). But 
Nature "will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons" 
(III, 225), and "When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the cen- 
tral reality" (VI, 305). The question is at once before us: How does 
that which is "never a cause but a perpetual effect" produce those "per- 
sons" who have the fatal ability to lose hold of the central reality? 

One who reads Emerson with the least care can hardly fail to notice 
that this contradiction, like so many others in the history of philosophy, 
is due primarily to a careless and inconsistent use of terms. We must 
therefore pause at the very outset to make a fundamental distinction in 
Emerson's use of the term "Nature." 

In the introduction to his little book on Nature Emerson says : "I 
shall use the word in both senses ; — in its common and in its philosophical 
import. In inquiries so general as the present one, the inaccuracy is not 
material; no confusion of thought will occur" (I, 11). In the "philo- 
sophical" sense Emerson considers Nature as meaning "all that is sep- 
arate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the Not Me, — all 
other men and my own body," but he still means to distinguish it from 
Soul. But while he does distinguish it from the individual soul which 
interprets this great reality as nature, he is not always careful to dis- 
tinguish between this interpretation of ours, and the great unknown 
reality of which it is the interpretation ; and so, in one breath he may 



THEORIES OF EVOLUTION AND EMANATION 41 

speak of Nature as illusion, phenomenon, a "perpetual effect," whose laws 
are therefore wholly dependent on the laws of mind, and in the next 
moment, by a simple metonymy, he may continue to speak of "Nature" 
while he is clearly referring to the cause behind it.®*' 

The confusion in Emerson's mind seems to have arisen from 
his endeavor to equate an inherited idealism, to which his adherence was 
largely emotional, with a theory of evolution which more and more 
forced itself upon him in his attempt to take account of an individual 
whose impulses proceed from within himself. Though he never wholly 
relinquished his belief that "nature proceeds from above," a growing be- 
lief in evolution may be traced throughout his work, — a belief so hostile 
to his earlier idealism that it finally forced him unconsciously to himself 
completely away from his earlier position. Let us trace briefly the 
growth of Emerson's belief in evolution, and see how it affected his 
answer to the problem of how a real individual may exist in a world of 
universal spirit. For it is his answer to this problem, which even Hegel 
sought in vain to solve, which gives to Emerson his real significance. 

In his book. Nature, in 1836, — in spite of the many times that the 
claim has been made for it, — there is no suggestion of evolution beyond 
a "somewhat progressive" ; nature is merely a "symbol" or "shadow" of 
spirit, a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, because an incarnation 
"in the unconscious"; it is nothing of itself, and does not work back to 
higher things; "a fact is merely the end or last issue of spirit" (I, 40). 
The famous verse ending, 

"And striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form," 

prefixed to the essay as we now have it, did not appear till the second 
edition, in 1849; the motto which was prefixed to the edition of 1836 
was from Plotinus, and merely to the effect that "Nature is but an image 
or imitation of wisdom," — a more appropriate text for the book which 
follows. In this earliest work of Emerson's there is suggested by the 
fields and woods only "an occult relation between man and the vegetable" 
(I, 16) ; his later problem is, How is this occult relation to be accounted 
for? 

It is on account of a certain instinctive anticipation of his later 
thinking, however, that Emerson, in Nature, is not wholly satisfied with 
Idealism as he finds it. It answers the question "What is matter?" but 



^° It would have been a great gain to clearness if Emerson had capitalized the 
word "Nature" when he meant to use it in this latter sense ; but his use of cap- 
itals is wholly indiscriminate, not only as regards the word "Nature," but even in 
his use of the words "Spirit," "Soul," and "Mind." 



42 EMERSON 

not "Whence is it?" nor "Whereto?" (I, 66). "This theory makes na- 
ture foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which 
we acknowledge to it" ; he would leave it, therefore, "merely as a useful 
introductory hypothesis, serving to apprise us of the eternal distinction 
between the soul and the world" (I, 67). 

We may fairly say, then, that Nature marks the first stage of Emer- 
son's thinking, in which the individual is "part and parcel of God," God 
is pure spirit in the real sense of the term, having a definite purpose and 
hence a certain infinite intelligence and will, and the world, so far as we 
are concerned, is an illusion which God is using for the education of 
those individuals who after all are not individuals at all. 

The assertion of the claims of the individual self against this over- 
powering reality was a necessity of Emerson's New England training, as 
it was of all western civilization. In philosophy, Emerson undoubtedly 
found it first in Plato. But it was almost immediately after his publish- 
ing of Nature, that is, toward the close of the year 1836, that he seems 
to have come under the influence of Lamarck, and we find his first ad- 
vance beyond that "occult relation between animals and man" which he 
felt as early as 1832 (Cabot, vol. II, p. 710), and which was as far as he 
had gone up to this time. I quote from Emerson's lecture on "The 
Humanity of Science," abstracted "as nearly as possible in his own 
words," by Mr. Cabot : 

"Lamarck finds a monad of organic life common to every animal, 
and becoming a worm, a mastiff, or a man, according to circumstances. 
He says to the caterpillar. How dost thou, brother? Please God, you 
shall yet be a philosopher. And the instinct finds no obstacle in the ob- 
jects. . . . Step by step we are apprised of another fact, namely, the 
humanity of that spirit in which Nature works ; that all proceeds from a 
mind congenial with ours." {A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 

n, p. 7250 

But we must know nature in its very essence, or else there is some- 
thing in the universe essentially apart from us. So Emerson's next step 
is the establishment of the actuality of the kinship of man to external 
nature. Again I quote from Mr. Cabot's careful analysis, and this time 
from the lectures on "Human Culture" given during the following win- 
ter (1837-38): 

"Man drinks of that nature whose property it is to be Cause. With 
the first surge of that ocean he affirms, / am.. Only Cause can say I. 
But as soon as he has uttered this word he transfers this me from that 
which it really is to the frontier region of effects, to his body and its ap- 
purtenances, to place and time. Yet is he continually wooed to abstract 
himself from effects and dwell with causes : to ascend into the region of 
law. Few men enter it, but all men belong there" {Ih., vol. II, p. 734)- 



THEORIES OF EVOLUTION AND EMANATION 43 

This is the most impossible of compromises, and some sort of ex- 
planation was an immediate necessity. Man cannot "belong" in one kind 
of existence and "be" in another. And so Emerson makes the distinction 
the following year that "man is related by his form to the world about 
him ; by his soul to the universe, — passing through what a scale, from 
reptile sympathies to enthusiasm and ecstasy" (lb., p. 737). This is cer- 
tainly not explanation, for it leaves an impossible dualism in the nature 
of man. 

Emerson does little to solve this difficulty in his next series (1839- 
40) : "Nothing but God is self-dependent. Man is powerful only by the 
multitude of his affinities. Our being is a reproduction of all the past. 
. . . The great Cause is alive, is hfe itself" (lb., p. 743). But this Hegel- 
ian attitude of mind was out of Emerson's range, and he falls back with 
a certain sense of security, as he does all through his life, on his older 
and surer "intuitions" ; "What are we all but the instant manifestation of 
the Divine energy? ... A man is not a man who does not yet draw on 
the universal and eternal soul" (lb., p. 746). 

This brings us to the year 1841, in which appeared the remarkable 
address on the "Method of Nature," and the First Series of the Essays, 
in which are contained some of Emerson's most final suggestions of 
theory ; so that we may consider from this point on, in what form the 
problem now appealed to him, and what was the logical if not the chron- 
ological development of his answer.^^ 

By idealism pure and simple, as the dilemma now appeared to the 
mind of Emerson, we must remain mere "ideas," whereas if we were a 



SI The Journals give us little to add and nothing to subtract from this state- 
ment of the development of Emerson's thinking through these critical years. The 
very language of the lectures may be found under dates closely corresponding, and 
I find nothing of real significance which is not stated or implied in the lectures. 
In 1836 Emerson is saying, "Man is the point vi^herein matter and spirit meet and 
marry" (Journals, IV, p. 78). He is of course more natural and explicit in 
wrestling with his problem in the soliloquy of the Journal than in his public ut- 
terances, though no more sincere and direct. In the Journal from which I have 
just quoted he writes (page 247) : "I see my being imbedded in Universal Mind. 
... I believe in Unity but behold two." It is thus that the problem appeared to 
him before the principle of evolution became a vital thing with him. He feels a 
"sympathy with nature" but finds "little access." At certain moments he knows 
that he exists "directly from God," and then he becomes "a surprised spectator" ; 
and he asks pathetically, "Can't I see the universe without a contradiction?" Next 
he finds that beasts are "wholly immersed in the apparent," that a "common soul 
broods over them, they are never individual as man is" (Journals, IV, p. 381). 
Beyond this evidence that Emerson was reasoning and not simply grappling with 
mystical intuitions, the Journals for the years 1836-1841 give us nothing that need 
detain us. 



44 EMERSON 

product of the evolving reality itself the unity of this great reality would 
be imperiled. Was there any compromise possible? Could there be any 
bridge between these two positions ? 

The first reconciliation which presented itself was the Emanation 
theory as he found it in Neo-Platonism. But on this he was forced to 
put a highly spiritualistic interpretation of his own. For Emerson was 
still striving to hold to the spiritual actuality of the source of things and 
to a certain independent finality in the individuals produced by this 
eternal process. Naturally he could find in Plotinus little encouragement 
beyond the mere idea of a perpetual emanation and return. But would 
it not be a sufficient account alike of the individual and the universal, if 
the world were conceived as an efflux of spirit, which, embodied for a 
time as nature, finally works back to spirit again? Emerson's statement 
of this is of course highly symbolic : 

"It is a steep stair down from the essence of Intellect pure to 
thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our 
system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether which 
slowly condensed into earths and moons, by a higher force of the same 
law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or intellec- 
tions. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first mind, and share 
its power" (XII, i6). 

Now it is impossible from the very nature of things that these 
"emanations," if they are of the same nature as God, could ever become 
"detached." Indeed, the very word "detach" is meaningless when ap- 
plied to mind. Furthermore, if these minds are like the original mind 
and "share its power," they should be able to give to their "thoughts or 
intellections" another independent existence, which it is obvious we can 
not do; nor would we speak in the language of space and time if the 
original mind did not. If we are of the same nature as God, we cannot 
receive the impressions he gives us and body them forth as a physical 
universe, unless he himself does so ; and what becomes of Transcendent- 
aUsm if space and time are the same to God as they seem to us? 

When Emerson says, "Nature is the incarnation of a thought and 
turns to thought again" (III, 187), he still knows very well that a 
thought cannot be incarnated ; that if it were the thought of anyone, even 
of God, it could have no separate existence, could by no means evolve or 
turn to anything. We cannot conceive of God as sowing ideas and reap- 
ing from them a spiritual substance. If nature were no more than the 
thought of spirit, we would be likewise no more than parts of speech — 
so many nouns in the grammar of God — and our subjective independence 
would be as hopelessly lost as ever. 



THEORIES OF EVOLUTION AND EMANATION 45 

Time and again Emerson's Idealism does drive him to confess this 
very point of view, at least so far as the lower orders of nature are con- 
cerned. Thus he says boldly, "These metals and animals . . . are words 
of God and as fugitive as other words" (II, 293). But while it is well 
enough to say that all the rest of creation is the thinking of God, Emer- 
son cannot seriously consider himself as the mere thought of some Being. 
How could he become so far separate from the Eternal One as to put 
an interpretation upon him or upon his other "ideas" ?- This drives him 
to the impossible explanation : 

"Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as 
plastic forces ; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius or 
constitution of any part of nature, which makes it what it is. The 
thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has dis- 
engaged itself and taken an independent existence" (XII, 5). 

But in feeling this need for thoughts which are more than 
thoughts, — which in being "plastic forces" are not thoughts at all, — 
Emerson was driven from his theory of emanation to a theory of evolu- 
tion which precluded the emanation idea. Upon this he was still able to 
put a thoroughly idealistic interpretation ; but that his gradual formation 
and acceptance of this theory did modify the type of idealism with which 
he started, there can be no doubt. In his first book. Nature, in 1836, 
Emerson feels that the evidence of our own being is "perfect" but that 
the world "is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the 
glories and certainties of day" (I, 66) ; in the essay on "Illusions," pub- 
lished in the Conduct of Life, in i8()0, he speaks of our pretension of 
selfhood as "fading with the rest," and finds "that in the endless striving 
and ascents, the metamorphosis is entire" (VI, 303). This is the main 
change, — from a purely idealistic interpretation of the world as illu- 
sion to an attempt to account for the presence of the individual by an 
evolution where "the metamorphosis is entire." 

Much has been said of Emerson's belief in evolution, as being an an- 
ticipation of the work of Darwin. Nothing could be further from the 
obvious facts than this. Except that he stood nearer to the day of scien- 
tific demonstration and had in consequence a slight leaning at times 
toward the scientific manner, there is nothing in Emerson which advances 
beyond the conclusions reached by Herder, — not to remark again that 
the belief in evolution is as old as recorded thought.-- Though he prob- 
ably had not read the writings of Herder or Oken, Emerson had some 

82 "The waters contained a germ from which everything else sprang forth" 
says the Rig- Veda, and with many such suggestions as this Emerson was un- 
questionably familiar. 



46 EMERSON 

preparation for the reception of ideas similar to theirs. ^^ But no direct 
influence or indebtedness is necessary here. Such ideas as these are 
always in the air for some time before the actual Darwin verifies them, 
and as Emerson himself remarks, the poet is always the first to feel 
them, thoug-h any man might easily anticipate the discovery. "Because 
the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the 
prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural 
science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was 
actually verified" (III, 176). Emerson's remained a poetic or at best a 
purely metaphysical anticipation of the fact of evolution, and so he stands 
wholly apart from all that constitutes the real significance of Darwin. 
Even after the theory had been established, it is in the same attitude that 
he looks back upon it. "Science was false by being unpoetical. It as- 
sumed to explain a reptile or mollusk, and isolated it, — which is hunting 
for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exist in 
system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal 
form as an inevitable step in the path of the creating mind" (VIII, 15). 



S3 See Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson's Biographical Sketch in the Centenary 
Edition (vol. I, pp. xxvi-xxx). 



IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT 47 



CHAPTER V. 

The Philosophy of Emerson (continued) : The Identity of Subject 

AND Object. 

It would seem that in accepting the doctrine of evolution Emerson 
would scarcely have been able to remain a mystic ; and indeed it is often 
said that he wrote sometimes as a mystic and sometimes not. I think 
this is a mistake. In the fundamental principles of mysticism he never 
wavered.®* However much he wrestled with his problem, and arrived 
stage by stage at his conclusions through definite processes of the "un- 
derstanding," he still felt a religious exaltation in the moments of his 
deepest insights, and this kept him firm in his belief in intuition and hence 
in the first-hand or original character of his perceptions. "When we are 
exalted by ideas," he says boldly, "we do not owe this to Plato, but to 
the idea, to which also Plato was debter" (IV, 24).®^ In like manner, 
however much Emerson may have been led either directly or through 
Coleridge toward the "Identitats" system of Schelling, which he is now 
about to offer as his final solution of the central problem of metaphysics, 
he arrived at his results from an entirely different point of approach, and 
it is this, rather than the actual results which he announces, that gives to 
his thinking its peculiar interest and value. "Do not teach me out of 
Schelling," he exclaims in his Journal, "and I shall find it all out for my- 
self." Let us see, therefore, by what process Emerson seems to have 
gone forward in his thinking from the point at which we left it in the 
last chapter to the "Identity" theory toward which he was constantly 
inclining. 

Omitting the starting-point of the existence of spirit before its ex- 
pression of itself as nature, since this expression was always a necessity of 

^•* To state the four propositions of mystical faith as given by Mr. Inge in his 
Christian Mysticism (pages 6, 7), is to state four of the most fundamental tenets 
in Emerson's philosophy. These are: (i) The soul (as well as the body) can see 
and perceive; (2) Man in order to know God must be a partaker of the divine 
nature; (3) "Without holiness no man may see the Lord"; and (4) The true 
hierophant of the mysteries of God, is love. Besides these there are many minor 
tenets in Mysticism as Mr. Inge explains it which are fundamental facts with 
Emerson, as that "Evil has no separate existence" (page 25). 

8^ Mysticism has no genealogy," says Vaughan in his Hours with the Mystics, 
but "grows spontaneously in a certain temperament of mind." 



48 EMERSON 

its existence and could never have had an actual beginning- in time, we have 
a logical priority which does not interfere with an ontological explanation 
more in accord with the obvious facts of the great evolution. We have 
the universal spirit as a developing or evolving reality, whose expression 
of itself in the successive states a, b, c, we interpret as inorganic matter, 
the plant creation, the animal creation ; we have no longer a mere Being, 
self-sufficient and passive, whose "thoughts" take body as nature and 
then of their own initiative turn to thought again. This becomes at once 
a mere figure of speech by which the priority of mind stands only for 
the reality of spirit; and nature, in being the perpetual and neccessary 
and to us explanatory effect, is no more than our interpretation of the 
very essence of spirit. To know the Universal spirit, therefore, we must 
study nature in its long progress from inorganic matter up to man ; and 
thus we shall be able to write, at least in part, a "Natural History of In- 
tellect." This is what Emerson means when he says, "I believe in the 
existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or 
real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through ab- 
solute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our ad- 
vancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish" (XII, 5 ; and X, 74).^^ 
Nature, as we come to know it in our study of Geology, is a "man- 
ifestation of God in the unconscious," or, as we must now interpret it, a 
manifestation of God before he attained to consciousness. But in his 
very nature, in the atoms, so to speak, of his original existence was an 
"outward impulse" (to borrow the word of Alexander Bain), — a "desire" 
to be other, — and of this desire in its constant realization, all nature and 
all human history is the continuous record. 

"We can point nowhere to anything final, but tendency appears on 
all hands ; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a 
field of maize in July ; is becoming somewhat else ; is in rapid metamor- 
phosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr 
of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent 
of new stars" (I, 194). 

But having made, in his own mind, a start in this direction, it seems 
to me that Emerson felt a great danger ahead of him. If consciousness 
was after all only a late step in the evolution of God, what is to save us 
from the terrible clutches of Materialism? — for until God attained to con- 
sciousness, he could not be Spirit at all in any proper sense of the term. 
I think this half-realized dread is the psychological explanation of Emer- 
son's constant insistence upon his extreme statements of Idealism even 



86 The statement is identical in both passages. 



IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT 49 

after he had attained his later position. Though he claims to have no 
fear of this frightful word (II, 285), yet it alone causes him to lose con- 
trol of himself. "The physicians say they are not materialists ; but they 
are : — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness : O so thin ! — ... 
I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, 
any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. 
Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one 
lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide" (III, 56, 
57). This is strangely unlike Emerson's usual calm tone. 

But our being caught in the chain of physical necessity results "from 
looking too much at one condition of nature, namely Motion" (III, 186). 
"The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will 
construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we 
must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and gener- 
ate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces.' . . . Nature, 
meanwhile, had . . . bestowed the impulse and the balls rolled. . . . 
That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of 
the systems and through every atom of every ball: through all the races 
of creatures, and through the history and performances of every indi- 
vidual" (III, 176, 177). 

Yet in attributing this impulse to the "primordial atom" Emerson 
himself reads almost like a materialist ; when he speaks of "the genetical 
atom of which both [plants and animals] are composed" (XII, 212), it 
is hard to remember what a visionary dreamer he was. But in his very 
use of the word "atoms" Emerson is only trying to make us feel the ab- 
solute necessity and completeness of spirit's expression of itself in the 
guise of nature, — the actual identity of the two. "The next step in the 
series is the equivalence of the soul to nature" (VIII, 209). It is there- 
fore only two instances of the same law that "atom draws to atom 
throughout nature, and truth to truth throughout spirit" (VIII, 211), 
since "There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in 
every particle" (X, 177) ; or as he puts it in the verse introductory to his 
last essay on Nature, 

"Self-kindled every atom glows" (III, 161). 

The atom which is "self-kindled" is a spiritual being; or at least, to Emer- 
son it seemed so.*"'" 

Since spirit is not to be separated from its expression of itself as 



860 Too little has been made of Emerson's obvious sympathy with and indebt- 
edness to Leibnitz. The strong individualism of this philosopher offered the same 
comfort to Emerson that it did to Schleiermacher ; but the American's greater 
love of freedom led him much further in this direction. 



50 EMERSON 

nature, this expression must be not only complete but perpetual. "We 
can never surprise nature in a corner ; never find the end of a thread ; 
never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg; 
the Qgg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of 
the world is the result of infinite distribution ... its permanence is per- 
petual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from 
which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is 
a new emanation." And then follows the important first step in the great 
evolution : "In all animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes 
that no chemistry, no mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mys- 
terious principle of life must be assumed, which not only inhabits the or- 
gan but makes the organ" (I, 190). 

The significance of this passage for a correct understanding of 
Emerson's thought is far-reaching. If the evolution of inorganic nature 
into man is a real evolution, there must creep in no dualism, no parallel- 
ism, between nature and mind. We find certain parts of inorganic nature 
suddenly and inexplicably equipped with a new principle — life. In like 
manner we must consider consciousness. With Emerson there is no more 
of a dualism between mind and matter than there is between life and mat- 
ter ; each is a new principle, a new step in the evolution of the spiritual 
substance. 

"It is a long way from granite to the oyster ; farther yet to Plato 
and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as 
surely as the first atom has two sides. ... A little water made to rotate 
in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells ; the addition of 
matter from year to year arrives at last at the most complex forms ; and 
yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the 
end of the universe she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two 
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, 
star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same 
properties" (III, 173, 174). 

There is, then, no creation of anything really new, — no transcend- 
ence of the laws of inorganic nature by the laws of life, or of conscious- 
ness, or of will. "Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to con- 
travene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them" 
(lb.). "Intellect and morals appear only the material forces on a higher 
plane. The laws of material nature run up into the invisible world of the 
mind" (X, 74). 

In being compelled to postulate "a deeper cause, as yet far from 
being conscious" (II, 72), Emerson was certainly relinquishing the pure 
idealism with which he started. Yet there was no escape for him. In 



IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT 51 

choosing between the theories of emanation and of evohition he was re- 
duced to a choice between two equally unsatisfactory alternatives : that 
God, as a conscious spirit, creates a world of appearance, which eternally 
works back into real being again ; or that God is impersonal, the very 
essence of things, and reaches his culmination in man. The first of these 
is God with a fictitious universe, the freedom of the individual being a 
part of the illusion ; the second is a world with a fictitious God. 

Of course neither of these could be Emerson's final view of things. 
His task must be to find a common ground alike for spirit and for nature. 
The great reaUty must continue to be. spirit in its very essence ; but if it 
is to account for this real world it must be not only spirit but more than 
spirit; nature must be as real an expression of it as spirit itself. 

And this leads to the inevitable result of trying to take account of 
both truths at once, of "the unity of cause and the variety of appear- 
ance" ; we must conclude that Spirit, as well as nature, is essentially an 
interpretation of our own. Just as we are driven from Materialism by 
the need to take account of the appearance of something forever dififerent 
from matter, so we are driven from the deeper but still inadequate con- 
ception of evolving spirit, in order to give any reality or independence to 
the individual. Aud thus is Emerson driven to his final theory of the 
identity of subject and object in "a substance older and deeper than either 
mind or matter" (VIII, 15). 

There are three great dangers which we are apt to fall into in our 
attempt to define the nature of this ultimate reality : we may make of it 
a mere logical abstraction, and in our desire not to deprive nature and 
spirit of their mutual relation and efficiency, we may land in a dualism 
with only a theoretical common ground of being; or wishing to escape 
this alternative and preserve at all costs the unity of the "Eternal One," 
we may fall into a worse mistake and sink both world and spirit in this 
immovable, overpowering Reality ; or finally, hoping to avoid both of 
these dangers, wishing to gain both unity and potency for the underlying 
substance and reality for both nature and mind, we may have proposed 
only a tertium quid, which is no solution of the great problem at all. To 
translate these three dangers to be avoided into three propositions to be 
established, we must find this Reality to be essentially One, yet to include 
in itself both spirit and nature, and to have therefore a reality as great as 
theirs and a potency as effective in producing a world of actual spirit and 
of actual nature ; — so that we may justly call this substance, according to 
our viewpoint, the "All-dissolving Unity," the "underlying Reality," or 
the "Great First Cause." 

The insistence upon unity always seems at first to be bought at the ex- 



52 EMERSON 

pense of reality. Emerson insists constantly upon both sides of the great 
dilemma, but he stands before the real problem of the One and the Many 
as hopeless as every greater philosopher since the mighty Greeks. But that 
this unity is an eternal fact is with Emerson perhaps the most funda- 
mental of all truths. "All the universe over there is but one thing, this 
old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any 
proposition may be affirmed or denied" (III, 233). But no supplying of 
hyphens can give a real unity to contradictory elements, — nor any such 
echoes of past philosophers as that "Nature is one thing and the other 
thing in the same moment" (HI, 225), or that "cause and effect are two 
sides of one fact" (II, 293). But Emerson does not often offend in this 
way. The unity so strongly insisted upon is an "all-dissolving unity" 
(VIII, 212) ; it has in itself the very essence of both nature and spirit, 
for "it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself" (III, 
58). So while it is a higher reality than spirit, — something from which 
this narrow and restricted personal spirit could emanate, — it is not less 
real than spirit, indeed does not cease to be spirit ; and as spirit Emerson 
refers to it immediately after saying that "in our more correct writings 
we give to this generalization the name of Being, and thereby confess 
that we have arrived as far as we can go" (III, 75). In like manner, as 
the unfolding of the life of this great Reality is shown in the evolution of 
nature, it is therefore at the same time Nature itself, and with a con- 
sistency which seems almost perversity, Emerson calls it by this name 
even while insisting upon its underlying unity and ultimately spiritual 
essence. 

We see, then, that this search after unity, which is the "noble rage" 
of all philosophers, was supplemented in Emerson by the instincts of the 
man of sense who can never content himself with an ideal unity or a 
metaphysical system perfect in logic but deficient in its power of ultimate 
conviction. Even in his most "transcendental" stage, in his book on 
Nature, he sets himself the philosophical standard which he never deserts. 
"Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test 
is, that it will explain all phenomena" (I, 10). If his theory of identity 
is to be of any service to Emerson, it must be because this Unity, this 
Reality, has in itself the power to produce this actual world of mind and 
matter, — its unity must be the "unity of cause" and its reality must ac- 
count for the "variety of appearance." And so Emerson at last considers 
it. It is "the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause before 
which all forms flee as the driven snow; itself secret, its works driven 
before it in flocks and multitudes . . . arriving at consummate results 
without a shock or leap" (III, 172). 



IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT 53 

In his calmer moments this figurative language disappears, and 
Emerson speaks as simply as he can: "Shall we describe this cause as 
that which works directly?" (Ill, 75). "The great and cressive self, 
rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence" (III, 78). But 
we cannot help feeling, as he does, the utter inadequacy of all this. He 
seems to come nearer the truth when he speaks in symbols ; and feeling 
this himself, it is notably characteristic of him that he at once attributes 
this same attitude to other men. With a most innocent lack of philo- 
sophic perspective, he remarks: "The baffled intellect must still kneel 
before this cause, which refuses to be named, — ineffable cause, which every 
fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as Thales 
by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (NoiJi;) thought. Zoroaster 
by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love: and the metaphor of each has 
become a national religion" (III, 74). 

But for Emerson himself the symbol was necessary not because of 
the uncertainty, but because by its very nature the ultimate Reality could 
not be adequately expressed in any other way. For if we content our- 
selves with calling it such names as Being or First Cause or the Eternal 
One we do not take account of its fulness and richness, — of the fact that 
"that central Ufe is superior to creation," that "forever it labors to create 
a life and thought as large and excellent as itself, but in vain" (II, 297). 
And so when Emerson calls this Reahty Spirit or Nature, he speaks no 
less symbolically than when he calls it Goodness (II, 289), or Wisdom 
(III, 188), or by any other name; for in including in itself all of these 
great principles it cannot be adequately called by the name of any one of 
them. We are reduced to the language which suggests, which half re- 
veals, but which never really betrays its meaning to the understanding. 
We would fain escape this dealing with what is other than we in terms of 
ourselves, — but how can we? How can we picture spaceless objects or 
conceive of timeless events? No more can the understanding escape 
from its own categories ; the reason conceives of a great Reality like to 
itself, but the understanding must needs name it Spirit ; — or, in wilder 
attempt to express this essence of things, must call it by some fantastic 
or symbolic name, as Creative Love, or Impersonal Reason, or Truth, or 
Justice, or Ideal Beauty ; but we speak still in terms of ourselves ; and so 
long as we speak or interpret at all, there is no escape from this. But 
when the faculties of the mere mind are closed and the underlying Real- 
ity which is in us and sustains us in our very existence awakes to con- 
sciousness, then do we truly perceive, or rather, then does Reality per- 
ceive itself ; — then does the worshipper become one with him whom he 
adores (II, 274), — then does God "commune with himself." 



54 EMERSON 

We may now see that Emerson's early statement, that the under- 
standing is fallen, — does not comprehend, — but that "our reason is not 
to be distinguished from the Divine Essence" (Cabot, p. 246), is conven- 
tional, and is really no more than he may easily have found (and undoubt- 
edly did find) in Coleridge. It is quite in Coleridge's manner, and lacks 
all sign of first-hand discovery. It has no philosophical influence upon 
his original work immediately following ; and yet this sentence expresses 
the very utmost of his philosophical reach. Later, the rapt, inspirational 
tone in which he speaks shows that he is no longer attempting to solve 
problems, but that he is telling of things which to him are sacred. Know- 
ing that he is foredoomed to failure in his attempt to utter that which is 
by its very nature unutterable, Emerson still attempts to say what this 
Reality is ; and this seems to me his deepest thought concerning the great 
Problem : 

"Meantime within man is the soul of the whole ; the wise silence ; 
the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related ; 
the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose 
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufiicing and perfect in 
every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the 
spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by 
piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree ; but the whole, of which 
these are shining parts, is the soul. ... I dare not speak for it. . . . All 
goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and ex- 
ercises all the organs ; is not a function . . . is not a faculty, but a light ; 
is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will ; 
is the background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not 
possessed and that cannot be possessed. . . . When it breathes through 
his intellect it is genius ; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue ; 
when it flows through his aftection it is love. ... It contradicts all ex- 
perience. ... It abolishes time and space. . . . The soul knows only the 
soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed" (II, 

253-257). 

And so that brilliant but mystical essay on the "Over-Soul" pro- 
ceeds, suggesting wonderful reaches of truth to those who have had ex- 
periences like Emerson's own, — suggesting nothing at all to the mass of 
men or the mere thinkers. But at the point of its approach to real origi- 
nality and greatness, Emerson's thought rises out of the realm of Phil- 
osophy altogether and dwells in the pure region of Religion. At this 
point, therefore, we must leave our attempt to trace his philosophical de- 
velopment, and concern ourselves with that faculty, or rather condition of 
mind in which the New England Transcendentalists thought the "pure 
practical reason" asserted its claims: — "that blessed mood," as Words- 
worth calls it in his "Tintern Abbey," 



IDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT 55 

"In which the burden of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world 
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood 
In which the affections gently lead us on, — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, ' 

And even the motion of our human blood, 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things." 

Our problem now becomes more technical and perhaps more tan- 
gible, though still dealing with elements forever somewhat vague, than 
the unraveling of Emerson's metaphysics has been — the chronicling of 
those glimmering suggestions of theory which were and were not his. 
What is really the meaning and significance of this belief in intuition? 
If it was a purely religious experience, superinduced by a certain exalted 
state of mind, is it to be dealt with as merely a pathological condition, 
and is that to negate wholly the religious implications which are derived 
from it ? 



56 EMERSON 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Epistemological Basis of Emerson's Philosophy: The Theory 

OF Intuition. 

Having attempted a general analysis of what we may term Emer- 
son's metaphysics, we are in some position to consider that element of 
his system which, with even greater apologies, we must call his epistem- 
ology. 

Emerson's belief in intuition was a logical deduction from his theory 
of identity. But it must be remembered that while the identity theory 
was a gradual growth in his mind, a belief in intuition was always at the 
very center of his system; that therefore the meaning he attaches to his 
faith in intuition will vary according to the stage he has arrived at phil- 
osophically in his theory of identity. I confess that this statement would 
have met with surprise and probably also with denial from Emerson 
himself, but I think it is true nevertheless. 

The usual opinion regarding Emerson's belief in intuition is that it 
is simply the unexplained and unphilosophical assumption of all Mysti- 
cism, namely, that the soul perceives because it is a part of the great all- 
knowing Reality ; or, as Emerson himself puts it, that the intellect's 
vision is "not like the vision of the eye, but is a union with the things 
known" (II, 304). This, so far as it goes, is a correct statement of 
Emerson's theory in every stage of its development, and, stated thus 
broadly, it is one which he never denies or contradicts. But again, stated 
thus broadly, nothing could be more hopeless of explanation than such 
a theory. By this "union," the Over-Soul not only fills but is the indi- 
vidual soul, just as the ocean tide fills and floods for a time the shallow 
brook flowing into it, and becomes one with it, and then retreats again, 
leaving the "brook," the individual mind, with only "a far-olT memory." 
But this "influx of the Divine mind into our mind" (II, 263), is a "pos- 
session" which leaves no room for anything but itself, so that to say we 
perceive in these great moments is only another way of saying that "the 
Maker . . . casts his dread omniscience through us over things (lb.) ; 
and yet, again, the individual mind must be something quite other than 
this universal spirit, for we are told that "we need only obey," that we 
have the power to "surrender" our wills, to "place" ourselves in the 
"stream of power and wisdom which animates all it floats," that we may 
"allow" the currents of the universal soul to flow unimpeded through our 



THEORY OF INTUITION 57 

being; indeed we may recognize its presence as a "joy and exultation"; 
and to receive it is an act of "piety." 

But Emerson's "intuition" continued to tell him that these things 
were so, however unaccountable they might be. That intuition was not 
to be explained by this first general statement of it he fully recognized; 
and through the year 1841, when his First Series of Essays was pub- 
lished, he continues to state the hopelessness of any attempt at explana- 
tion. In his address on "The Method of Nature" in that year, he writes : 
"But at last what has he to recite but the fact that there is a Life not to 
be described or known otherwise than by possession ? What account has 
he to give of his essence more than so it ivas to he? . . . There is the 
incoming or the receding of God : that is all we can affirm ; and we can 
show neither how nor why" (I, 195). And again, in the essay on "Self- 
Reliance," though recognizing the common origin of ourselves and of 
nature, he does not yet see how intuition is to be explained : "We denote 
this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. 
In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all 
things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm 
hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, 
from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and 
proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also 
proceed." For a moment we seem on the verge of an explanation. "We 
first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as ap- 
pearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause." But 
"if we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, 
all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm" 
(11,64,65). 

Because of Emerson's so constant insistence upon this merely mys- 
tical point of view, especially in his better known and more purely phil- 
osophical essays, it is commonly felt that he makes no advance upon it. 
Intuition remains a "pious reception," or at best a "glad and conspiring 
reception," an openness "of one side of our nature" to receive new truth ; 
and farther than this, even Cabot says, "he did not attempt to go in the way 
of doctrine." ^^ But though Mr. Cabot knew Emerson's writings so inti- 
mately, and his work under Emerson's own eye was always so wholly 
satisfactory to his master, yet there does seem to be more to say for 
Emerson's intuition theory than just this. In the Essays of the Second 
Series and in all his writings after 1844, the thought of an explanation 
was in Emerson's mind, — the growing desire to write a "Natural History 
of Intellect," which at last he tried — and failed — to do. 



87 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I, p. 235. 



58 EMERSON 

It was not, it seems to me, the impossibility of explaining intuition 
so much as the very assurance it claimed for itself that led in Emerson's 
mind to the demand for a deeper account of it. Indeed, this positiveness 
of the intuition is its own negation ; for if it may ever know wrongly, so 
that a later intuition may contradict or transcend it, then it may always 
know wrongly, and there is no test for it. Though Emerson will not 
admit this directly, yet we find him in his later essays becoming less as- 
sertive and more inquisitive regarding the ultimate nature of this per- 
ception of actuality; and as soon as he does this the conclusion becomes 
inevitable that the self-consciousness of the reason is a relative matter; 
that while indeed the soul could not perceive falsely, yet there must be 
certain conditions which clog and hinder its perfect vision ; that it must 
not be separated too completely from the understanding, and from the 
processes of nature by which it is derived. 

When Emerson came to consider that a deeper cause than spirit must 
be postulated as the ground of being, the explanation of intuition was at 
once possible though it seems not to have been immediately apparent to 
himself. If he could have accepted this new solution frankly and fully, 
and not have bound himself down (though of course with entire honesty) 
to a continued adherence to those earlier "intuitions" which he had un- 
consciously outgrown, there would be no confusion in following out his 
system to its close. But the religious, the supernatural side of intuition 
impressed him so deeply that he no sooner made a new "generalization"' 
than he felt the need of stating, side by side with it, his belief in the old. 
It is this that makes his essays so bafHing, that has led so many to feel 
the utter hopelessness of trying to find in them any order or consistency 
whatever. 

From the very start Emerson taught that "Nature is the present 
expositor of the Divine mind," and can be wholly known to man since 
"its laws are laws of his own mind ;" and hence he could say that "the 
ancient precept, 'Know thyself,' and the modern precept, 'Study nature,' 
become at last one maxim" (I, 88). But so long as he gave even a nom- 
inal adherence to the purely idealistic theory of the dependence of nature 
upon spirit, every door to a possible explanation of intuition was closed 
to him. That he felt this, and was about to make a new "generalization" 
appears plainly from his essay on "Circles," in what is perhaps the most 
significant sentence in his whole philosophy. "Fear not the new general- 
ization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy 
theory of spirit ? Resist it not ; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of 
matter just as much" (II, 285). Yet nowhere in the Second Series of 
Essays, where he is most concerned with giving the causes of things 



THEORY OF INTUITION 59 

which before he had merely assumed, does he quite come to the point of 
the explanation of his chief difficulty. In the last essay on Nature, though 
here we find the balance wholly in favor of evolution and the identity of 
the soul with nature, he has only the tone of explanation, with no real ad- 
vance, so far as intuition is concerned, beyond his first position : 

"This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts 
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carried the world in his 
head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Be- 
cause the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the 
prophet and discoverer of her secrets" (III, 176). 

In like manner, in the "Experience" essay, in the "Nominalist and 
Realist," and in the less frequent philosophical passages in the other es- 
says of this series, he contents himself with proclaiming again the un- 
limited "extent" and "validity" of intuition, while he makes no clear 
statement as to the "origin" of our knowledge of things. But in the in- 
troductory essay to his next book. Representative Men, Emerson no 
longer hesitates to draw the inevitable conclusion : 

"The possibility of interpretation Ues in the identity of the observer 
with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side ; has its 
translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere 
where it plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their 
ends, all things continually ascend. The gases gather to the solid firma- 
ment ; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows ; arrives at the 
quadruped, and walks ; arrives at the man, and thinks. But also the con- 
stituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only rep- 
resentative, but participant. Like can be known only by like. The rea- 
son why he knows about them is that he is of them; he has just come 
out of nature, or from being a part of that thing" (IV, 16). 

Now if there is indeed a final consistency in Emerson's thought, an 
underlying synthesis possible for even the main elements of it, it must 
lie in his final belief that the intuition is due not only to the spiritual es- 
sence of the "Reason," but also to the fact that the self-consciousness of 
the Reason is itself the result of the evolution of "Nature." In Emer- 
son's first period the perception of the individual "reason" is due to some 
inexplicable union with the universal "Reason," followed by an even 
more incomprehensible severance from it ; but by the coming in of the 
evolution theory a seemingly rational explanation of intuition becomes 
possible. 

And yet, stripping it of its transcendental coloring, what is this but 
the merest realism? Nominally, intuition remains to the end an "angel- 
whispering, — which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years" 
(III, 69) ; but in cold actuality "We define Genius to be a sensibility to 



60 EMERSON 

all the impressions of the outer world" (X, 78), and genius, be it re- 
membered, is the action of the soul when it "sees absolute truth" (I, 91). 

According to Emerson, then, the common background of being rises 
in the lower animals to the point of instinct, which is "nature when it 
first becomes intelligent" (XII, 33), and "Inspiration," which is the vis- 
ible working of intuition in man, "is only this power excited, breaking 
its silence" (XII, 32). Thus the instinct of animals, which is the same 
in kind as intuition in man, though lower in the stage of its development, 
is still "higher than the understanding" (I, 319). But this sharing of the 
common nature is all there is to the plant or animal, for only the Intellect 
"emancipates the individual, for infinite good and also for infinite ill" 
(quoted by Cabot, vol. II, p. 734). As mere products of nature, men are 
not true individuals at all. But the development of the intellectual facul- 
ties in man produces an individual in the true sense of the term, one who 
can transcend the common nature and impose his personality upon it, so 
that under this inhibitory efi^ect the underlying nature becomes "dor- 
mant." "As the reflective faculties open, this subsides" (X, 75). It is 
because he ceases to share in the immediate possession of the common 
essence of all things, and develops into a separate entity, that "the indi- 
vidual is always mistaken," and therefore our prime duty is to "sur- 
render" our will, that is, to remove the inhibitory efi^ect of the under- 
standing upon the divinity within us ; in other words, to go into a per- 
petual state of "ecstasy." When we do so, the Soul lives through us, and is 
genius or is virtue or is love in a man, according as it "breathes through" 
his intellect or his will or his affection (II, 255). Later, his realization 
that "all nature is ecstatic" led Emerson to feel that the animal also must 
yield to nature in order to realize "his highest point ;" that the difference 
in intelligence and even in morality is "only of less and more" (X, 178) ; 
but this line of thought came to him too late in life, and he stops short 
with it before going very far. 

But though Emerson considered that "ecstasy" is a state in which 
the activity of the understanding is partially or totally suspended, and a 
deeper, instinctive nature asserts itself, yet the difficulty of this for psy- 
chology is fundamental. Since this divinity or "reason" is "complete and 
perfect in every man," is "adult already in the infant man," it follows that 
the suspension of our ordinary thinking faculties would make deities of 
us all. Leaving aside all equally obvious objections, this theory leaves a 
complete dualism in the mind of man. In so far as it has any further in- 
terest for us, therefore, Emerson's intuition theory relates itself not to 
his philosophical but to his religious insights, and as such we must take 
our final account of it. 



THE RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF EMERSON's PHILOSOPHY 61 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Religious Implications of Emerson's Philosophy: The 
Nature of God; Human Responsibility; Immortality. 

The state which Emerson describes as "ecstasy" was in his own case 
one of reUgious enthusiasm, superinduced largely, as with all mystics, by 
the strain of a lofty contemplation, but of course without any of the vul- 
gar features which attended the ecstasies of those mystics whose condi- 
tion was brought about by abnormal or unhealthy processes. His natural 
sanity and normal habits of life contributed to make his "subliminal self" 
well balanced, — with none of the fetid and disordered dreams so com- 
mon in this condition. Presumably his moments of profound ecstasy 
were very occasional, for of this he himself complains ; and his later 
attempts at philosophical construction, such as the Natural History of 
Intellect, contain no more of the old fervor than would naturally be due 
to previous habit. In his admirable essay on Emerson, Mr. John Jay 
Chapman notes that the mystical mood comes to us all, even in health, 
but is then only momentary, while with Emerson it was a prevailing 
habit ; and this is true. But Emerson himself tells us that the "mood" 
varies from the slightest thrill of virtuous emotion to enthusiasm and 
ecstasy. Only his occasional and deepest moments, therefore, can justly 
be considered as being due to an abnormal condition. 

What seems actually to have led Emerson to his belief in intuition 
is the peculiar emotional experience which seems to have attended it ; he 
was "strangely affected" by any unusual experience, by "seeing the shore 
from a moving ship" and the like. "The least change in our point of 
viev/ gives the whole world a pictorial air ;" that is to say, it introduces 
a feeling of unreality (I, 55). Even as late as 1844, when this condition 
must have been passing away, he writes, "Life wears to me a visionary 
face." Implicitly he argues from his psychological state to the reality of 
what he believes causes that state. The experience, as Mr. Chapman 
says, is one common to all. There is a feeling of "otherness" which at- 
tends the discovery or reception of such a large and new idea as is related 
somehow to the soul's growth. Even when one is working over a prob- 
lem in Mathematics, bewildered and blinded by the mere figures, and sud- 
denly the whole large solution of it comes over him, then he seems to 
himself to see with other eyes; let the new discovery have a life sig- 



62 EMERSON 

nificance and it is perfectly natural to attribute it to a divine revelation."^ 
There are two ways in which a belief in intuition may be inter- 
preted. It is possible for one to accept his own intuitions, asserting their 
infallibility without proof; or he may lack confidence in himself and his 
own intuitions, but recognize their possibility in other and holier men 
than he, and accept unquestioningly what those claiming to be so inspired 
have said. In the former class were the great majority of the lesser 
members of the Transcendental group ; in the latter class were those 
who, puzzled with the multifarious problems of the period we are study- 
ing, found peace and rest in the authority of the church of Rome. And 
not only in the Catholic reaction, but in the development of such con- 
servatism as Goethe's the tendency of the believer in intuitions is often 
away from the individualism of his own perceptions to the acceptance of 
what is universal, — the result of the intuition of all men ; so that it is 
not uncommon to find the Transcendentalist a defender of prevailing in- 
stitutions. Emerson's attitude shows something of a compromise be- 
tween these two extremes. On the one side was his constant preaching 
of self-reliance, — the necessary result of the belief that "not I speak but 
the Father speaketh through me ;" on the other side that eager, expectant 
attitude with which he listened, — "hungrily" it is said, — to the opinions 
of all about him. His faith in persons, said Bronson Alcott, amounted 
almost to superstition.-" The seeming inconsistency of this is resolvable 
in Emerson's gradual inclining toward the second belief, that any other 
might have a finer insight, a loftier imagination than his own. It is 
doubtful if he would have taught his great principle of self-reliance so 
insistently and incessantly if he had not been by nature self-distrustful. 
Intuitions, he felt, must be tested by their conformity to the moral law ; 
they are to be got, not by an efifort of will, but by self-renunciation ; they 
are to be prepared for by purity in life and thought, and to be worked 
out in character and action. 



88 If it was this experience of exaltation that led Emerson to his belief in 
himself and his religious reverence for his own intuitions, the reason for his taking 
serious!}' the inspirational claims of his associates could easily be found, I think, 
in his interpreting in the light of his own emotion the difference between their 
ordinary and their serious conversation. Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott, for 
example, in their published writings have little of philosophical value, for here 
they wrote in propria persona, so to speak ; yet their personal impression on such 
men as Emerson was very great. An "inspirational lecturer" who seemed to me 
somewhat left over from Transcendental days, betrayed in a private conversation 
a difference almost incredible between his attitude of mind when concerned with 
the petty and annoying affairs of every-day life, and when talking about the deeper 
things of life. 

^^ Life of Emerson, p. 46. 



THE RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF EMERSON's PHILOSOPHY 63 

And thus it was, with these TranscendentaUsts, that no faith or 
phase of faith, even if it had been "revealed" by a previous "intuition," 
could stand before a new flood of light. Brownson, one of the most 
typical of the TranscendentaUsts, went from creed to creed, each time 
knowing that at last he was right, and the last time (or tvv^o) knowing 
that he "could not be wrong." It is this assurance in the face of the ob- 
vious impossibility of confirmation that makes mysticism essentially a 
matter of faith, and that makes all faith, to the extent that it is faith 
merely, a matter of mysticism. Thus faith must always have its psy- 
chological explanation, and must be essentially super-rational or it is not 
faith at all. It can never allow for doubt on the one hand, or for proof 
on the other. 

Before considering what were the religious implications of Emer- 
son's philosophy, we must take account of one other element essential to 
a correct understanding of his attitude. Beyond what I have called his 
habit of lofty contemplation and his sense of the unreality of things, 
there was in Emerson a certain childlike sim.plicity of mind which made 
him feel himself, as he seemed to others, to belong to the very scheme of 
things,^ — a certain sublime naturalness which led Theodore Parker to say 
that he thanked God in his prayers for the sun, moon, and Emerson. 
This feeling of kinship to nature and to God seems to be essential to the 
true mystic, and to be the very foundation of his faith, whether it take 
the form of the profound philosophic speculations of a Spinoza or the 
sweet childish babblings of a William Blake. The occult relation which 
in 1832 Emerson felt in the Jardin des Plantes to exist between the ani- 
mals and man,^° and which still appeared occult to him after forty years 
of philosophizing (X, 20), joined with his sense of the immanence of 
God and the transitoriness of the "surfaces" amid which we live, was it- 
self, and without any special psychological condition, sufficient basis for a 
mystical philosophy. 

It has been said, upon how complete data of evidence I do not 
know,^^ that no crime is possible to the "subjective mind" which would 
not be possible to the subject in his waking state. However this may be, 
it would seem that one's sub-conscious nature is largely (if not wholly) 
what he has made it. Emerson's remarkable purity of heart, his eleva- 
tion of thought, the beauty and serenity of his life, led him to recognize 
the deity within him as of that large and passive make which we find 
smiling so blandly through his pages. For as "the poor Indian whose 
untutored mind" coins a deity after his own pattern, v/hen in a moment 



"0 Cabot, vol. II, p. 710. 

"^ Thomas Jay Hudson : Law of Psychic Phenomena. 



64 EMERSON 

of deep mysticism he watches the sun go down into "naked space" and 
feels the night creep closer about him, so the enlightened Emerson sub- 
tends his arc of divinity to cover his own conception of the universe. 
There is a deep and essential truth in the perverted saying that "man 
created God in his own image," — for how could it be other? No reve- 
lation, even, could tell us more than we are capable of conceiving. "The 
god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and 
of the merchants a merchant," says Emerson himself (VI, 196). 

When we come to consider what Emerson has to say as to the first 
of the three great postulates of religion, concerning the nature and ex- 
istence of God, we find a most curious combination of intuitive percep- 
tion with philosophical deduction. Working quietly and with all due 
philosophical decorum on the necessity of this "unbounded substance" or 
"illimitable essence," he is wont suddenly to burst into a rhapsody of fer- 
vid assurance, apparently conceiving of God as a personal Being ; which 
sudden intuition he immediately tries to bury in the argument upon which 
it has unwarrantedly intruded. "O my brothers, God exists. There is a 
soul at the center of nature and over the will of every man, so that none 
of us can wrong the universe" (II, 132). With the fervor of the prophet 
always creeps in the symbolism of the poet ; almost before he knows it 
the word is spoken ; the secret which cannot be known has been pro- 
claimed abroad. 

But how far is it possible to reconcile the God of Emerson's faith 
with the God of his philosophy? Was he, in the last analysis, theist or 
pantheist? In making statements which imply now the theistic and now 
the pantheistic conception, Emerson merely wishes to hold himself aloof, 
somehow, from committing himself to either point of view. It was 
again his feeling that the perfect truth lay deeper than any actual ex- 
pression of it. In the same attitude he even goes so far as to say that he 
had reason for believing in Unitarianism and the other ism at the same 
time.^^ And so Emerson nowhere expressly denies either side of this 
great question. When he speaks of coming upon a secret which "sweeps 
out of men's minds all vestige of theism" (VI, 302), it is only the beliefs 
which "their fathers held" that he means. It is this conception of God 
that he repudiates with so much lofty scorn. "When we have broken our 
god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire 
the heart with his presence" (II, 274). Parker felt that Emerson was 
always a theist, though his vagueness in the use of terms laid him open 
to the pantheistic charge, and Holbeach claims not only that Emerson 



^2 Quoted by Dr. M. D. Conway in The Critic for May 1903. 



THE NATURE OF GOD 65 

is theistic but that all good theism is transcendental.®^ The most definite 
defense of Emerson's theism seems to me that of Mr. G. W. Cooke : 

"To limit Emerson's idea of the Infinite Spirit to what he has said 
directly about God would be to do him a great injustice. His idea of God 
is presupposed in his idea of the soul, and must be studied in conjunction 
with it. The conception he entertains of the soul necessitates belief in 
God as a supreme intelligent Existence. A thinking soul cannot hold 
communion with an unthinking essence." ®^* 

This seems to me perhaps a trifle arbitrary as an interpretation of 
Emerson's thought as a whole ; for whether it possible or not, Emerson 
seems to have believed finally that this underlying Reality arrives at con- 
sciousness in man, and that this is all the "communion" there is : — it is es- 
sentially a soliloquy. That God has any other means of self-communica- 
tion than this, Emerson does not teach ; that which is "Reason" in man, 
in Nature is only "Spirit," — an impersonal reality whose eternal progress 
is fully reflected in its "gigantic shadow." 

But this seems to confine God to a very limited and recent selfhood, 
and to exaggerate the importance of man to an infinite degree. It 
brings us near to the conclusions of a contemporary critic: "Pantheism 
sinks man and nature in God ; Materialism sinks God and man in the 
universe; Transcendentalism sinks God and nature in man."®* Years 
later Emerson himself wrote in his Journal, "Transcendentalism says, the 
Man is all" (VII, 268). But Emerson could scarcely stop just here. 
Man cannot be the culmination of Nature, for man is a failure when 
viewed in such a light (I, 192). But "to questions of this sort," says 
Emerson, "Nature replies, 'I grow.' . . . T have ventured so great a stake 
as my success in no single creature, I have not yet arrived at any end' " 
(pp. 193, 194). That is to say, God may yet attain to a degree of self- 
realization in some conscious entity more perfect than we — for "Nature 
can only be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular 
end" (p. 192), although "the termination of the world in a man appears 
to be the last victory of intelligence" (p. 195). In taking this teleolog- 
ical tone, Emerson does not mean to imply conscious purpose or fore- 
sight ; all he can find is "one superincumbent tendency" ; merely the 
faith that "there is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is 
system and gradation" (VI, 308). Purpose is not imposed upon a pas- 
sive universe but is the very constitution of things. "Every star in heaven 
is discontented and insatiable" (I, 202). 



*3 Contemporary Revieiv, vol. XXIX, p. 481. 

»3o Ralph Waldo Emerson : His Life, Writings, and Philosophy, p. 288. 
^* American Whig Review, vol. I, p. 2^. Not signed, but written by William 
B. Greene. 



^ EMERSON 

But when we speak of the ''evolution of God," of his "arriving" at 
consciousness only in man, we are talking in terms of the phenomenal 
world. Surely Emerson knew that God and the world of reality tran- 
scend space and time, for he has said so clearly and repeatedly. Then if 
this self-reaHzation is not a temporal process, why may not any of the 
great tenets of theism be true ? Consciousness in the part may not imply 
consciousness in the totality, but if we rise above these phenomenal lim- 
itations, does it in the least preclude self-consciousness in the totality? 

When he came to considerations of this sort, Emerson seems to 
have been unable to think consistently or even clearly. It would require 
more than special pleading to find in whatever growth there may be in 
his system any increasingly profound comprehension of this problem. 
He always gives, or means to give, a complete adherence to Kant's doc- 
trine : at the very start he assumes this point of view ; later he writes, 
"Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but 
the soul is light" (II, 66), which is a fairly adequate translation into his 
own poetic language of the main conception of the Transcendental 
Aesthetic ; and after he had come into his period of more prosaic phrase- 
ology he says punctiliously (if somewhat arbitrarily) that "science has 
come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought" (VI, 303). 
But in spite of all this, I believe that Emerson never did and never could 
free himself from a practical belief in the Lockean conception. As Kant 
himself says, we cannot think space away from objects, or time out of 
events; and however often Emerson may have disposed of these elements 
philosophically, he still found himself compelled to reckon with them. In 
spite of his transcendental tone he can say, "My eyes and ears are re- 
volted by any neglect of the physical facts" (I, 189) ; and however he 
might reason himself away from these, to these he always returned. An 
interesting instance of this occurs in the most profoundly mystical of all 
his essays, where, after showing how the "Over-Soul" is above all our 
limitations, such as space and time, he proceeds with an elaboration of 
this idea from a wholly poetic standpoint, and returns to note the soul's 
advances by a metamorphosis in which time is an essential element (II, 
256-258). And later, again, in his recognition of "boundless space and 
boundless time" as "the two cardinal conditions" of nature (III, 173), he 
shows clearly that his conception was at best really Spinoza's and not 
Kant's. 

If there is no room in Emerson's philosophy for a theistic conception 
of God by a removal of the ultimately impersonal element with the re- 
moval of the limitations of time and space, is there any other means by 
which this mere background of being may be raised to become the actual 



IMMORTALITY 



67 



God of Emerson's apparently unhesitating faith? Such arguments as 
that there must be a God to satisfy the cravings of the universe are not 
arguments at all, and to this level Emerson seldom descends. The near- 
est approach to a reconciliation lies in the references he makes to God as 
"the Soul of the world," the suggestion for which he may have got, like 
the Stoics themselves, from Plato. But this conception is not quite true 
to his main theory ; for in reducing the relation between mind and mat- 
ter to an actual substance underlying both, the body-soul simile of which 
the Stoics make so much is no longer possible. If God were only one of 
the results of the evolution of this primordial substance, or one aspect of 
it, there would be something in the universe "older and deeper" and more 
inclusive than God himself; and in such a conception Emerson could 
never believe. In remaining a mystic and adhering to his belief in im- 
manence as against transcendence to the very end, Emerson was forced 
to remain, as he always was, a pantheist. "When I speak of God," said 
Emerson once, "I prefer to say It — It." ^^ 

On the freedom of the individual Emerson's whole philosophy was 
based, and all refractory elements were forced to accord first of all with 
this apparent fact. Yet it must be admitted that the possibility of indi- 
vidual freedom is ultimately unanalyzable, that even with Emerson it is 
a clear perception of the intuition and no more. And again, though he 
has said so much of high interest concerning immortaUty, yet Emerson is 
careful not to draw too positive a conclusion as to this mighty mystery. 
Indeed, this is his one subject of grave doubt. The reason for this is as 
interesting as it is apparent. During his moments of intuition he might 
readily "perceive" the existence of God or his own freedom, but he could 
scarcely foresee the fact of his immortality. On this account he was 
compelled to take the subject out of the sphere of argument altogether. 
"Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length of 
life but depth of life. It is not duration, but a talking of the soul out of 
time, as all high action of the mind does" (VIII, 329). But in arguing 
that we cannot argue about this subject, because in our moments of in- 
tuition we perceive that we are in our highest state immortal, we come 
upon the most delightful of paradoxes ; we may be immortal for a time, 
and then, as we descend from this state of exaltation, we may cease to 
be immortal! If we are really serious in our abolishing of time, the very 
word Immortality has no meaning. As much as this Emerson practically 
admits when he says, "These questions which we lust to ask about the 
future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer 



95 Recorded by D. G. Haskins in Ralph Waldo Emerson : His Maternal An- 
cestors, p. 130. 



68 EMERSON 

in words can reply to a question of things" (II, 266). He means that 
that which is personal to each one is not the "soul," which is "perfect 
and identical in all," but those later developed faculties of the under- 
standing, and that therefore immortality is a question of the "understand- 
ing" and cannot be answered by the "reason." 

In spite of himself, however, Emerson can not quite get away from 
the question of a personal immortality. But beginning with doubt on 
this subject,®® he ends in utter negation, though he is said to have looked 
forward at the time of his death with some hope of a future recognition. 
Even in the essay in which he most constantly asserts his belief, he is 
constrained to admit that he sees no place for it in his system: "I con- 
fess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never 
spares the individual" (VIII, 325). Sometimes his faith rises to the 
point of saying, "If it is best that conscious personal life shall continue, 
it will continue" (VIII, 313) ; and he offers by way of justification of 
this faith that "The ground of hope is in the infinity of the world ; which 
infinity reappears in every particle, the powers of all society in every in- 
dividual, and of all mind in every mind" (p. 316) ; or, more definitely, 
"If we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward ac- 
tion is the argument for immortality" (VI, 279). But even this he feels 
at last is futile. "An individual body is the momentary arrest or fixation 
of certain atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this en- 
chanted statue, are released again to flow in the currents of the world. 
An individual mind in like manner is a fixation or momentary eddy in 
which certain services and powers are taken up and minister in petty 
niches and localities, and then, being released, return to the unbounded 
soul of the world" (XII, 25). 

This is his last word, in his final excursion in philosophy. The 
Natural History of Intellect. There is something strangely sad about 
this last philosophical attempt of a man who had built his whole life's 
argument on the belief that he could know, as he clings bravely to the 
memory of his better insights, and struggles forward with the broken 
remnants of a philosophy which had once been so full of bright promise 
and eager hope. 

We find, then, that Emerson's doctrine of intuition is futile also in 
the purer realm of religion. The best that Emerson can say is the best 
that we all say, and no more. To prove the existence of a personal God 
would rob us of our right of faith, which needs only that philosophy shall 



8^ At twenty-three he writes in his Journal (II, 178) : "I believe myself im- 
mortal. The beam of the balance trembles, to be sure, but settles always on the 
right side. For otherwise all things look so silly. The sun is silly . . ." 



THE RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF EMERSON's PHILOSOPHY 69 

not preclude the possibility, — as surely it does not ; to prove human 
freedom and responsibility is to prove what in the heart of us we all 
know, however hardened determinists we may clam to be ; to prove im- 
mortality would be only, at best, the deifying of Paley, the putting of a 
prudential motive on all our conduct. In applying his "philosophy of in- 
tuition" to the great postulates of religion, Emerson was only proving 
again the final negative answer to the Transcendental Dialectic. 

We have tested Emerson by the highest standards. May we not 
conclude that he failed to do, in the great guesses of philosophy and re- 
ligion, only what the greatest philosophers themselves have failed to do, 
namely, to give a definite answer to our fundamental problems? Before 
he meets his final failure he comes, it seems to me, very far along the 
road of a consistent idealism ; and in the account that he does take of the 
nature and workings of intuition he comes as close as anyone has yet 
come to the making of Mysticism a philosophy; and he makes the one 
definite contribution of showing why, if Mysticism be true, it cannot be 
explained in philosophical terms. The acceptance of Emerson's philos- 
ophy is, like that philosophy itself, a piece of pure mysticism. It may be 
recognition but it is never conviction. However sober and well ordered 
his argument may be for a time, it is always the religious instinct that 
is speaking, and only he who hath ears to hear can receive the message. 
In Emerson's own poetic language, "Jove nods to Jove from behind each 
of us." 

It is in this very fact that his greatness lies. If he had made a more 
philosophical appeal, I doubt if his importance would be half so great. 
For as it is the religious instinct that receives such truths, so religious 
men are always the discoverers and prophets, — never philosophers, or 
those whose appeal is to the intellect primarily. It is on account of its 
religious nature that the appeal of mysticism, either at first or second 
hand, is so overpowering when it comes. 



70 EMERSON 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Emerson's Ethics: The Moral Law; Origin of the Virtues; 

Optimism. 

I have attempted to show that Emerson in his own pecuHar and orig- 
inal way worked through the central problem of metaphysics till he came 
to the Dark Tower itself. At least I am not aware that any thinker has 
actually gone farther with pure philosophic theory than did Emerson in 
his deepest insights ; though of course when the masters have broken 
the way the mere learner may easily come as far. Emerson's philosophy 
is negative not only in that it goes sufficiently far and with sufficient con- 
sistency to show that a rational explanation of the universe is impossible 
along Transcendental lines, but more positively negative, so to speak, in 
that it leads inevitably to the conclusion that the final and highest result 
of such philosophizing is the giving up of philosophy for questions of 
more practical value. And so Transcendentalism, as I said at the begin- 
ning of this essay, means little or nothing apart from its practical appli- 
cation. 

Emerson's thinking along the lines of ethics is not to be taken as 
the mere talk of a cultured gentleman. It is a consistent part of his 
idealism. Blandly superficial as he is so often and as he seems so habit- 
ually, he still has sufficient depth to make us return again and again with 
increased respect for the calm majesty of his thought and the high con- 
sistency of his purpose : — the purpose of bringing to the average think- 
ing man a vital concern with these subjects, — of these subjects so sterile 
and unprofitable in the hands of our technical theorists. But here Emer- 
son's work commands our greater respect, since in his thinking along these 
lines he was more of an anticipator of later writers than in his philosophy 
he was an vmconscious follower of the thinkers before him. 

But the same things which have led men to pass by Emerson's phil- 
osophy so lightly have prevented their giving to his ethics the attention 
it deserves. Since Emerson's day we have mortgaged to our scholars the 
entire estate of learning; we have become trespassers if we dare to think 
outside the schools. Emerson dared; and the makers of our scholastic 
caste have snubbed him roundly for it. On the other hand, to those who 
would gladly accept him as a writer on ethics, even while denying him 
the rank of a philosopher, his manner of stating his principles ofifers the 



Emerson's ethics 71 

same obstacles. His method is still statement and restatement of his cen- 
tral point of view, always the same though seen in many different aspects, 
never bolstered up by deduction or burdened by logical proof — impert- 
inent to one who sees the fact as fact.''^ We should now have, in conse- 
quence, an equal task in educing his theory from his poetic form were it 
not that his ethical teachings are an obvious corollary of his idealism. 
There is no more in Emerson's ethics than the translation and elabora- 
tion of his philosophical dicta in ethical terms ; indeed the ethics implies 
the philosophy just as much as the philosophy entails the ethics. 

The coming to the plane of consciousness, it will be remembered, is 
regarded by Emerson as the "fall of man" (III, JJ^- Spirit no longer 
works according to its own perfect laws. "And the blindness of the in- 
tellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the 
will begins when the individual would be something of himself" (II, 
255). This doctrine of the "lapse," which Bronson Alcott had absorbed 
probably from his reading of Plotinus and had poured forth in his solemn 
manner into Emerson's credulous ears, was applied by the latter un- 
flinchingly to his newly formulated theory of evolution, and thus formed 
the basis of his ethics. We have the attainment of a moral will at the 
expense of innocence. And the law applies not only to us but to all cre- 
ation. "The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the 
cup of thought, are already dissipated ; the maples and ferns are still un- 
corrupt ; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will 
curse and swear" (III, 174). 

But back of individual freedom are the fast laws of fate, as we call 
all operation of law in the outer world (VI, 211). Of these laws, as I 
have already noted, the highest and all-inclusive is the moral law. The 
moral law, which in us is the moral sentiment (lb.), is the very ground- 
work of our being, and thus not only we but in a deep sense total nature 
is moral. "For though the new element of freedom and an individual 
has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are prefigured and predes- 
tined to moral issues, are in search of justice, and ultimate right is done" 
(VI, 209). 

In remembering these two complementary principles, the whole 
ethics of Emerson becomes apparent at a glance. Since the universe 
is essentially moral, "Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of 
things" (II, 151) ; which is only another way of saying that a man pos- 
sesses all virtues when he is possessed by the great Source of all. "If 
he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him" (II, 269). 
By this we are raised "not into a particular virtue, but into the region of 



9^ Compare W. T. Harris in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. L, pp. 238 ff. 



72 EMERSON 

all the virtues ... so there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt 
when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it en- 
joins. . . . The heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds 
itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular 
knowledges and powers" (II, 258). 

The means to the attainment of this great end, this snnimum honum, 
so far as it requires volitional and hence moral action on our part, is 
obedience. "We need only obey" (II, 132). Obedience is, therefore, in 
a sense, the only virtue, and even it is not so much a virtue as an "act of 
piety." While an uncompromising self-surrender is the one condition to 
this Emersonian "self-realization," yet there is no scourging of the flesh, 
or triumphant rising of the spirit from victory to victory. It is here that 
Emerson's Unitarianism asserts itself in opposition to the earlier Congre- 
gationalism. "To the well-born child all the virtues are natural and not 
painfully acquired" (II, 259). Like the later teachers of the "gospel of 
relaxation," Emerson would have us yield ourselves naturally and with 
perfect trust and rest, to the great power within us which sustains us and 
which "constitutes us men." 

"In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of 
our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves 
great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed 
when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who 
strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either God 
is there or he is not there. . . . 

"Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all 
practical life. . . . That which externally seemed will and immovable- 
ness was willingness and self-annihilation. . . . 

"The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life 
might be much easier and simpler than we make it ; that the world might 
be a happier place than it is ; that there is no need of struggles, convul- 
sions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the 
teeth ; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism 
of nature" (II, 127-129). 

But this is only one aspect of the matter. Emerson's main conten- 
tion in his first little book, Nature, is that Discipline — the moral edu- 
cation of man — may be "The Final Cause of the Universe." On this 
seemingly contradictory point of view he insists again, thirty years later, 
in a second essay on "Character": "On the perpetual conflict between 
the dictate of this universal mind and the wishes and interests of the 
individual, the moral discipline of life is built. The one craves a private 
benefit, which the other requires him to renounce out of respect to the ab- 
solute good" (X, 96). And with a psychological insight as remarkable in 



M^ 



ORIGIN OF THE VIRTUES 73 

Emerson as it is rare, he tells how this morality dependent upon freedom 
is produced. "But insight is not will, nor is affection will. . . . There 
must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will" (VI, 33). 
I might well have paused over the metaphysical and psychological sig- 
nificance of this sentence ; but I have chosen to give it only its ethical 
bearing, since it is not an integral part of Emerson's Transcendentalism. 

Of the origin of conscience, Emerson has therefore this account to 
offer: "I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all 
animated nature ; there is no dift'erence of quality, but only of more and 
less. . . . The man down in nature occupies himself in guarding, in feed- 
ing, in warming and multiplying his body, and, as long as he knows no 
more, we justify him; but presently a mystic change is wrought, a new 
perception opens, and he is made a citizen of the world of souls ; he feels 
what is called duty ; he is aware that he owes a higher allegiance to do 
and live as a good member of this universe. In the measure in which he 
has this sense he is a man, rises to the universal life. The high intellect 
is absolutely at one with moral nature" (X, 178). 

From this account of the origin of the virtues, their classification 
becomes an easy matter. "There is no virtue which is final" (II, 295). 
"The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, 
and extinguishes each in the light of a better" (II, 293). There is, then, 
a hierarchy in the virtues, the lower and simpler, of course, being the 
earliest produced. We pass from the individual virtue of physical cour- 
age, which is the mere "affection" of love joined with the "insight"of its 
universal value in opposition to and triumph over the self-conserving in- 
stinct of fear ; to the personal virtues of chastity and temperance, by 
which we improve our own natures and make them more effective to 
universal ends at the expense of and triumph over our natural appetites 
and inclinations ; to the third and final type of virtue, exemplified in jus- 
tice and love, which are the public virtues, and show the active opera- 
tion of virtue where it exists at its fullest — in our relation to others. The 
public virtue, justice, will of course have its own stages of development 
in the history of civilization. "The civil history of men might be traced 
by the successive ameliorations as marked in higher moral generaliza- 
tions ; — virtue meaning physical courage, then chastity and temperance, 
then justice and love ;— bargains of kings with peoples of certain rights 
to certain classes, then of rights to masses, — then at last came the day 
when, as historians rightly tell, the nerves of the world were electrified 
by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal" (X, 181). 

But if the one condition to the attainment of virtue is personal free- 
dom, its prime essential is a certain austerity of manner. To the highest 



74 EMERSON 

success ease and comfort are fatal. "He who aims high must dread an 
easy home and popular manners" (VI, 155). As with Hegel, there is no 
virtue but in the overcoming of vice. "Nature is upheld by antagonism. 
. . . without enemies, no hero. . . . the glory of character is in affront- 
ing the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power" (VI, 
242). "Let us replace sentimentalism by realism," cries our idealist and 
"dreamer" (VI, 206). "Nature, as we know her, is no saint. . . . Her 
darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law; 
do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctu- 
ally keep the commandments" (III, 66). From this "realism" the ethical 
deduction is inevitable : 

"We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the 
wiser God says, Take the shame, the poverty and the penal solitude that 
belong to truth-speaking. Try the rough water as well as the smooth. 
Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. When the state is un- 
quiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a revolu- 
tion which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don't be so tender 
at making an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry some- 
times, and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts. The 
finished man of the world must eat of every apple once. He must hold 
his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite. Fie has neither 
friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power" (VI, 

155)- 

We are now ready to confront the problem of Emerson's reconcilia- 
tion, if he has one, of his two main ethical doctrines, — the absence of all 
struggle in the attainment of all virtue in self-surrender, and the "per- 
petual conflict" of the will, upon which the very essence of morality is 
based, and by which the separate virtues were produced. Emerson's own 
answer, if he were brought face to face with it, might be one of those 
maddening, frank admissions of both sides of a flat contradiction. "This 
is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these ex- 
treme points and reconcile them" (VI, 10). There is, however, in this 
case, as so often, only a seeming contradiction. The inconsistency is the 
same as in the case of universal spirit and individual selfhood and free- 
dom, and is capable of a corresponding resolution. "From this transfer 
of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the 
mind, follow easily his [the idealist's] whole ethics. It is simpler to be 
self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to 
need no gift, no foreign force" (I, 315). And from his idealism, con- 
sistently also, comes his practical ethics : "Do not cumber yourself with 
fruitless pains to mend and remedy remote effects ; let the soul be erect, 
and all things will go well" (lb.). On the other hand, from the equally 



OPTIMISM 75 

primary fact of human freedom comes of necessity the need of sin and 
strug'gle. "In morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience" (VI, 65). 

But as each virtue is extinguished "in the light of a better," the final 
virtue will be, obviously, as with Spencer, the rising to a supra-virtuous 
plane ; virtue will be "its own reward" because it is no longer difficult 
but natural and inevitable. Each intermediate good involves its struggle 
of will, but the "highest good" is when the will negates itself, which is 
the last step in our "self-realization." The individual must "lose his life" 
in the great Reality in order "to find it." This, on the one hand, is no 
more than an ethical rendering of the religion of Jesus, of the philsophy 
of Hegel, of the poetic insight of Goethe. But on the other hand, Emer- 
son is as thorough-going and up-to-date a Eudsemonist as any among^ 
us;"* though we might perhaps coin for his ethics the name of Eleuther- 
ianism, since the self-realization culminates in perfect freedom, supra- 
volitional, as the final and highest good. And in this I find no contra- 
diction, but an ethical insight wise and far-reaching. 

"And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song which 
rises from all elements and all angels, is a voluntary obedience, a necessi- 
tated freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world is, he shares 
the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is il- 
luminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the 
sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by struc- 
ture" (VI, 229). 

It will be seen from all this how it is that Emerson's ethics culmin- 
ates in so absolute an optimism. Professor Santayana says that Emerson 
had no sufficient warrant for his optimism, that it was only "a pious tra- 
dition" from the religion of his ancestors, that survived in him as an 
instinct ; and suggests that he allowed "his will and his conscience to be 
hypnotized by the spectacle of a necessary evolution." "" Mr. Inge, also, 
though writing in a wholly dififerent strain, tells us that there is no com- 
fort in Emerson's optimism, because it is blind i^"" and many others, after 
reading the flat absurdities in the over-famous essay on "Compensation," 
have felt that Emerson's optimism could be nothing but a wilful disre- 
garding of the facts of life. Even his fellow Transcendentahsts, especi- 
ally Margaret Fuller, felt a certain "aloofness" about him, and accused 
him of never coming close to reality. To a certain extent there was a 



98 Hedge regards Emerson simply as a Stoic because of the "emphasis with 
which he affirms right to be the absolute good, right for its own sake, not for any 
foreign benefit." {Literary World, XI, 176.) 

Q'-" Poetry and Religion, pp. 228, 229. 

100 Christian Mysticism, p. 321. 



76 EMERSON 

temperamental serenity about Emerson which went far to make the op- 
timism of his daily life; he preferred always to put the bright side for- 
ward ; yet no one was ever more deeply concerned with "things as they 
are," or faced more unflinchingly or with keener sympathy the tragedy 
and imperfections of life. But these things were to him partial, and he 
kept his eyes fastened on the totality, which he still judged to be good. 
That which distinguishes Emerson from his fellow Transcendentalists 
is not absence of the emotional but presence of the intellectual. 

It is worth noting that Emerson contends always that "Nature is 
reckless of the individual" (VI, 133), and that if "the final cause of the 
world is to make holy or wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not 
succeeded" (I, 192). In justice to this neglected side of Emerson's view 
of things, I may be pardoned for quoting his splendid and stirring con- 
demnation of the aspirations and pleasures of men: 

"Read alternately in natural and in civil history, a treatise of astron- 
omy, for example, with a volume of French Memoires pour servir. 
When we have spent our wonder in computing this wasteful hospitality 
with which boon nature turns off new firmaments without end into her 
wide common, as fast as the madrepores make coral, — suns and planets 
hospitable to souls, — and then shorten the sight to look into this court of 
Louis Quatorze, and see the game that is played there, — duke and mar- 
shal, abbe and madame, — a gambling table where each is laying traps for 
the other, where the end is ever by some lie or fetch to outwit your rival 
and ruin him with this solemn fop in wig and stars, — the king ; — one can 
hardly help asking' if this planet is a fair specimen of the so generous as- 
tronomy, and if so, whether the experiment have not failed, and whether 
it be quite worth while to make more, and glut the innocent space with 
so poor an article" (I, 192). 

And the mass of men fares no better at his hands : 

"In our large cities the population is godless, materialized, — no bond, 
no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, 
thirsts, fevers and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live 
on, — so aimless as they are? After their pepper-corn aims are gained, it 
seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any 
worthy purpose. There is no faith in the intellectual, none in the moral 
universe. ... In creeds never was such levity ; witness the heathenisms 
of Christianity, the periodic 'revivals,' the Millennium mathematics, the 
peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mor- 
mons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of rappings, the rat and 
mouse revelation, thumps in table-drawers, and black art. The architec- 
ture, the music, the prayer, partake of the madness ; the arts sink into 
shift and make-believe. Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors ; 
the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the Dark Ages" 
(VI, 199, 200). 



OPTIMISM 17 

But back of all this, which is surely a sufficient account of the dark 
side of life, the optimism of Emerson is unshaken. "In front of these 
sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil" (VI, 240). 
It is the method of nature to play off vice against vice. "Most of the 
great results of history are brought about by discreditable means" (VI, 
243). To Emerson in his more poetic mood, the purple mountain and 
the ancient wood declare 

"That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, 
Leads all souls to the Good" (IX, 78). 

Emerson had as much faith as Horace Bushnell in the "moral uses of 
dark things." "In our life and culture everything is worked up and 
comes in use, — passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, and not less, folly and 
blunders, insult, ennui and bad company" (VI, 249). This attitude of 
Emerson is well illustrated by an incident recorded by Edward Everett 
Hale.^°^ They were considering a college youth who had taken many 
honors and established a brilliant record. "I did not know he was so fine 
a fellow," said Emerson. "And now, if something will fall out amiss, — 
if he should be unpopular with his class, or if his father should fail in 
business, or if some other misfortune can befall him, — all will be well." 
This was not cynicism or paradox but sincere conviction. 

The first and most obvious argument for Emerson's optimism is that 
it is the ethical reading of the great fact of evolution. David Lee 
Maulsby, in a doctoral dissertation on The Contribution of Emerson to 
Literature (1911), makes Emerson's "unqualified optimism" a corollary 
of the doctrine of the immanence of God; Professor James finds it one 
of the philosophical directions of his states of mystical ecstasy/"" Aug- 
ustine Birrell considers that it "rests on his theory of compensation" ;^°' 
W, Robertson Nicoll calls it a "direct inference" from certain of Emer- 
son's "propositions" which seem to me rather to be derived from his op- 
timism than to have given rise to it ;^°* William F. Dana believes Emer- 
son's optimism purely intellectual and not at all derived from Christian 
dogma ;^°^ Francis Grierson states that "the explanation of Emerson's 
optimism lies in his intellectual aloofness, his mental indifference to 
things beneath the plane on which he lived." "^ For all these divergent 
views, and others, warrant can be found in the essays. But only in his 



101 Works, vol. VIII, p. 256. 

102 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 416. 
"^^^ Emerson: a Lecture, p. 41. 

^''^ North American Review, CLXXVI, 678. 

105 flic Optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 53. 

^°® The Celtic Temperament, p. 93. 



78 EMERSON 

evolution doctrine can I find an ethical basis for this famous optimism 
which everyone feels he must explain. As such, at least, it needs neither 
explanation nor apology. "We only insist that the man meliorate, and 
that the plant grow upward and convert the base into the better nature" 
(VI, 246) ; "Meliorism is the law. The crudest foe is a masked bene- 
factor" (X, 182). Yet in the last analysis this argument for optimism 
also resolves itself into a mere statement of larger faith : 

"If the Divine Providence has hid from men neither disease nor 
deformity nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in 
war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, in hunger and need, in 
tyrannies, literatures and arts, — let us not be so nice that we cannot write 
these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt but there is a counter- 
statement as ponderous, which we can arrive at, and which, being put, 
will make all square. The solar system has no anxiety about its reputa- 
tion, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe ; nor have I any fear 
that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of 
practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down- 
weigh" (VI, 194). 

From this it would appear that optimism is only another name for 
faith. If so. Professor Santayana is quite right in saying that there is no 
philosophical basis for the optimism of Emerson, but that it was due to 
his religious instinct. One sometimes wonders if optimism is not always 
either temperamental or religious in its origin. But this does not in the 
least imply that it is illogical, or unwarranted, or "bUnd." Indeed the ul- 
timate warrant of optimism is well put by Emerson in one crisp, ringing 
sentence: "We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out 
that it was mean?" (II, 251). If human nature is wilful and weak, still 
it is human nature that sees this and condemns it; and however good 
humanity might grow, the pain of imperfection and the haunting ideal 
of an ever unrealized good must still be in us to keep the old world going. 
"Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall 
into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, 
but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!" (Ill, 76). 
Or again : 

"The fiend that man harries. 
Is love of the best" (IX, 11) ; 

and in the pain of this is our perpetual salvation. 

It will be seen from this that there is considerable point in making 
the distinction that there are three stages in Emerson's optimism, corre- 
sponding to the three stages in the development of the individual : there 
is the optimism of the senses, the pessimism of the understanding, and 



OPTIMISM 



79 



the optimism of the reason.^*'^ The first stage is illustrated by Emerson's 
untiring insistence upon the beauty of nature; the second is seen in the 
conflict of will with things as they are, — a conflict foredoomed to failure ; 
the third is found when we consider this immediate need of action in its 
relation to the great scheme of things. Optimism is still a matter of 
faith, but it is a faith founded upon reason. In his essay on "The Sov- 
ereignty of Ethics" Emerson writes : 

"Thus a sublime confidence is fed at the bottom of the heart that, 
in spite of appearances, in spite of malignity and blind self-interest living 
for the moment, an eternal, beneficent necessity is always bringing things 
right ; and, though we should fold our arms, — which we cannot do, for 
our duty requires us to be the very hands of this guiding sentiment, and 
work in the present moment, — the evils we suffer will at last end them- 
selves through the incessant opposition of Nature to everything hurtful" 
(X, 182) . 

lo'^ J. F. Dutton, in the Unitarian Reviezv, vol. XXXV, p. 132. 



80 EMERSON 



CHAPTER IX. 

Emerson's Contribution to Sociology : The Individual and the 
State; the Brook Farm Idea; Theory of Education. 

No one can have a fundamental philosophy dominating his entire 
thought, and write upon the subjects of art and society, without imply- 
ing more or less of an Esthetics and a Sociology. But these, with Emer- 
son, are mere corollaries which might be deduced from his philosophy if 
he had written no word on either subject. He himself, though from the 
first he showed a genuine interest in these matters, seems to have become 
conscious of how his ideas had formulated regarding them after his 
prime creative impulse had somewhat spent itself in the working out of 
his idealism ; and hence we find separate essays devoted rather to the 
actual results of his thinking than to a tentative working out of his ideas 
as they came to him, which is his usual method in treating of philosophic 
problems. His late and somewhat commonplace essay on Civilization 
(VII, 23-37), ^OT example, deals directly with the subject matter of 
Sociology with a definiteness of system and order which shows that 
Emerson was merely recalling and restating opinions which had long 
been familiar to him; and much the same thing will be found true of his 
various essays on art and beauty. Yet as one gives his attention to what 
Emerson does actually say in the province of Sociology,^"® he becomes 
again surprised at the rigid consistency of his thinking, and at the depth 
of it. 

There are two principles at the basis of Emerson's democracy: (i) 
the Universal Mind is open to all men, hence all men have a divine right 
to their opinions; and (2) the great (that is, "representative") man is 
he who is most open to receive truth, while the many — the mob — are 
"blind mouths" ; so that property, culture, even aristocracy of a sort are 
essential to any true democracy. In several articles which have appeared 
in various periodicals, it has been said that Emerson was like Carlyle in 
his attitude toward the man of genius. I do not see how anyone who had 
read enough of Emerson to venture a printed opinion could hold such a 
view. Julian Hawthorne has the right of it in this instance: "He was no 
hero-worshipper, like Carlyle. A hero was, to him, not so much a power- 



^08 I use the word in its broadest sense. 



Emerson's contribution to sociology 81 

ful and dominating personality, as a relatively impersonal instrument of 
God for the accomplishment of some great end." ^°'* 

It cannot be denied that there was in Emerson, as there was in 
Shakespeare, an instinctive abhorrence of the "vulgar herd," and a cor- 
responding predilection in favor of good birth and breeding. "For a 
philosopher," said Walt Whitman the super-democrat, "Emerson pos- 
sesses a singularly dandified theory of manners." ^^° And indeed there is 
much in Emerson's published utterances which might justify this criti- 
cism. "The best are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to 
say they separate as oil and water . . . each seeking his like" (VII, 19). 
From his very boyhood, we find this attitude of Emerson recorded in his 
Journals. At nineteen he writes: "From the want of an upper class in 
society, from the admirable republican equality which levels one with all, 
results a rudeness and sometimes a savageness of manners which is apt 
to disgust a polished and courtly man" (J. I, 147). 

Much more which might be quoted in this connection seems to stand 
in contrast to those more typically American sentiments which we may 
also find abundantly on Emerson's pages, and again the old charge of in- 
consistency confronts us ; and again it is to be answered by noting both 
sides of the contradiction with their synthesis occurring together in the 
same essay. Let me cite a passage of each sort from "Considerations by 
the Way" in the Conduct of Life volume : 

"Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, 
lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to 
be flattered but to be schooled. . . . The worst of charity is that the lives 
you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses ! the calam- 
ity is the masses. ... If government knew how, I should like to see it 
check, not multiply the population. . . . Away with this hurrah of 
masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on 
their honor and their conscience. In old Egypt it was established law 
that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think 
it was much under-estimated" (VI, 237). 

Is this not rare snobbishness ? But look ten pages farther : 

"By humiliations, by defects, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of dis- 
parity, learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman. 
A Fifth- Avenue landlord, a West-End householder, is not the highest 
style of man ; and though good hearts and sound minds are of no condi- 
tion, yet he who is to be wise for many must not be protected. He must 
know the huts where poor men lie, and the chores which poor men 

109 "Emerson as an American" in The Genius and Character of Emerson, 
p. 68. 

^1-0 Literary World, XI, 177. 



82 EMERSON 

<lo. ... Take him out of his protections. . . . Plant him down 
among- farmers, firemen, Indians, and emigrants. Set a dog on him; 
set a highwayman on him ; try him with a course of mobs ; send him to 
Kansas, to Pike's Peak, to Oregon; and, if he have true faculty, this 
may be the element he wants, and he will come out of it with broader 
wisdom and manly power" (VI, 247, 248). 

It is the turn of the poor man to point his finger at the pampered rich, 
and to claim Emerson as his very own ! But Emerson's desire regarding 
rich and poor alike is "to draw individuals out of them": 

"The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee. But the 
units whereof this mass is composed, are neuters, every one of which 
may be grown to a queen-bee. . . . To say then, the majority are wicked, 
means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but simply that the major- 
ity are unripe, and have not yet come to themselves, do not know their 
opinion" (VI, 239, 240). 

This, then, is all a part of Emerson's extreme individualism. His 
attitude toward the State is to be wholly explained by his belief in the ul- 
timate value of each member of the commonwealth either in actuality or 
in potentiality. And as freedom is the last reach of his eudaemonism, if 
I read Emerson's Ethics aright, so freedom for the individual should be 
the final purpose of the State ; and to apply this axiom is the purpose of 
all Sociology. This attitude Emerson takes in his Journal as early as 
1827: "Wise men perceive that the advantage of the w^hole is best con- 
sulted in consulting the real advantage of the particular" (J. II, 174) ; 
and he is still saying the same thing in his Second Series of Essays in 
1844: "The only interest for the consideration of the State is persons 
. . . the highest end of government is the culture of men" (III, 195). 
But w^hether this should result in a democratic or monarchial form of 
government, in socialism or in anarchy, he is not so sure. With one who 
persists in seeing both sides of every question it is inevitable that there 
should be statements looking in each direction. 

"Every human society" writes Emerson in his Journal, "wants to be 
officered by a best class . . . who are adorned with dignity and accom- 
plishments" (J. VIII, 99) ; yet the fact remains that "thousands of human 
beings may exercise toward each other the grandest and simplest senti- 
ments as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers" (J. Ill, 221). In 
his English Traits Emerson has much to say regarding the artificiality, 
inequality, and even tyrannical nature of the English social system : "The 
feudal character of the English state, now that it is getting obsolete, 
glares a little, in contrast with the democratic tendencies. The inequality 
of power and property shocks republican nerves" (V, 166). But before 



THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE 8S 

he is done, the other side of the matter claims his attention : "The Amer- 
ican system is more democratic, more humane ; yet the American people 
do not yield better or more able men, or more inventions or books or 
benefits than the English. Congress is not wiser or better than Parlia- 
ment. France has abolished its suffocating old regime, but is not re- 
cently marked by any more wisdom or virtue" (V, 290). In one mood he 
can say, "I am thankful that I am an American as I am thankful that I 
am a man" (J. Ill, 189) ; and in another mood, "Any form of govern- 
ment would content me in which the rulers were gentlemen" (J. VI, 446). 
And all of this means merely that the individual is of prime importance, 
and 

"The state may follow how it can. 
As Olympus follows Jove" (IX, 74), 

At times this attitude leads Emerson to the position made famous 
by Rousseau : "As if the Union had any other real basis than the good 
pleasure of a majority of the citizens to be united" (I, 368) ; and this 
leads on into occasional statements of frank and open anarchy: "Hence 
the less government we have the better. . . . To educate the wise man 
the State exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State ex- 
pires" (III, 206). Asked by his English friends if any American had an 
idea of the right future of this country, he thought not of the statesmen 
who would make America another Europe, but "of the simplest and 
purest minds ; I said, 'Certainly yes ; — but those who hold it are fanatics 
of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to 
which it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it is the only true.' So I 
opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance" (V, 272). 

Consistent individualism is bound to end in anarchy. But all the con- 
notation of that word is foreign to Emerson's nature ; and his principle 
of "non-resistance" renders his principle of "no-government" quite in- 
nocent and harmless. At times a threat lurks in the shadow : the prin- 
ciple of church and state is wrong, he says boldly in his Journal, and 
vitiates charity and religion ; but "I persist in inaction . . . until my hour 
comes" (J. V, 294). And after he has refused to join in Ripley's Brook 
Farm experiment he seems to excuse his own conscience by saying, "I 
do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. 
I wish to break all prisons" (J. V, 473). 

The same attitude shows in what he has to say regarding the pri- 
vate ownership of land. His whole sympathy, says Salter, was with the 
rising tide of social democracy.^^^ "Whilst another man has no land, 

m hiternational Journal of Ethics, XIII, 414. 



84 EMERSON 

my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated" (I, 224). He 
even goes so far as to say, or to sing, rather, 

"None shall rule but the humble, 
And none but Toil shall have" (IX, 175). 

Yet on the other hand, when Thoreau inveighed against private prop- 
erty Emerson wrote in his Journal, "I defended, of course, the good in- 
stitution as a scheme" (J. V, 128) ; and while protesting that the philo- 
sophic class need no possessions he points out that others do, because 
property is their certificate of merit. "It is very cruel of you to insist, 
because you can very well forego them, that he shall" (J. IV, 244). The 
heart of his address on "Man the Reformer" is contained in the sen- 
tences : "Every man ought to stand in primary relations with the work 
of the world; ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his 
having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonor- 
able and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties. . . . Why needs 
any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome 
apartments, access to public houses and places of amusement? Only for 
want of thought" (I, 229, 232) ; whereas the essay on "Wealth," pub- 
lished some twenty years later, is largely the elaboration of his opening 
contention that every man "is by constitution expensive, and needs to be 
rich" (VI, 85). 

And again all this — one grows ashamed to say the same thing over 
so many times — means merely that property is justified or is not, accord- 
ing as the individual reaches his highest selfhood through it or by the 
want of it. "Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is pedantry 
to give such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with 
these counters, as well as with those? in the institution of property, as 
well as out of it?" (Ill, 249). 

With regard to all the institutions of society, therefore, the test is 
the highest good of the individual. Should the United States government 
be upheld when it is threatened by civil war? By all means. "It would 
be a pity to dissolve the Union and so diminish immensely every man's 
personal importance" (J. VI, 495). Then should its laws be sacred and 
implicitly followed? By no means! "Every actual state is corrupt. 
Good men must not obey the laws too well. . . . Any laws but those 
which men make for themselves are laughable" (III, 199, 205). And 
not only the state, but "the world exists for the education of each man. 
. . . He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied 
by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography 
and all the government of the world" (II, 14). 



THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE 85 

Yet it is patent that "institutions are renovated only by combining 
independence and actual separateness" into some form of union (J. VI, 
297) ; that while "the Spirit detaches you from all association" (p. 300), 
it is still the Spirit v^hich "makes society possible" (II, 264) ; and hence 
while Emerson "will not sign a paper [and] abdicate my freedom" (J. 
Ill, 385), he fully recognizes the value of the community and of civiliza- 
tion, especially as it is this very thing which makes possible his independ- 
ent way of living (J. II, 400) ; he recognizes that what is best for the 
individual is in reaUty "the good of all' (X, 183), that we earn our bread 
"by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit" (I, 
235), but the fundamental fact is always that "the union is only perfect 
when all the uniters are isolated. . . . Each man, if he attempts to join 
himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his propor- 
tion" (III, 253). If the individual wears the yoke of the multitude's 
opinion, then there is no more freedom in this tyranny than in that of 
kings. 

That combining of men, therefore, which is instinctive in them, must 
go on, but must be for the sake of the individuals who make up the com- 
bination. It must never be for the sake of the product but for the sake 
of the producer only that a man should forfeit his right to "the amount 
of manual labor which is necessary to the maintenance of a family" (I, 
230). "I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the result, — I would 
not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and pride, nor to that 
of a great class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton and better 
men" (I, 184). Nor should the man of letters or the philosopher sep- 
arate himself from health-giving toil, even if this "indisposes and dis- 
qualifies for intellectual exertion. . . . Better that the book should not 
be quite so good, and the book-maker abler and better" (I, 230, 231). 

The few passages in Emerson which have a socialistic cast are there- 
fore just as individualistic as his most anarchistic statements. "If prop- 
erties of this kind [music and works of art] were owned by states, towns, 
and lyceums, they would draw the bonds of neighborhood closer. . . . 
The public should step into the place of these [feudalistic European] 
proprietors, and provide this culture and inspiration for the citizen" (VI, 
98). Emerson believes that there should be fair play and an open field — 
an equal scope for every creature ( IV, 30) ; that in his highest stage 
man is devoted "no longer to the service of an individual, but to the com- 
mon good of all men" ; that we must not insist on such "coarse local dis- 
tinctions as those of nation, province, or town" (V, 147) ; that "Society 
is barbarous until every industrious man can get his Uving without dis- 
honest customs" (VI, 85) ; that "we make by distrust the thief, and bur- 



86 EMERSON 

glar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him so" (I, 240) ; 
that therefore "the very prison [should be] compelled to maintain itself 
and yield a revenue, and, better still, made a reform school and a manu- 
factory of honest men out of rogues" (VII, 29) ; that the unemployed 
poor cost as much in our taxes for poor-rates as if we paid them wages 
(VI, 108). But all these comments, which are the commonplaces of 
many a socialistic writer, are isolated expressions of a generous sentiment 
backed by an unwavering belief in the prime value of the individual man. 

Emerson's inherent antagonism to all socialistic schemes of reform 
is best shown in considering his relation to the Brook Farm experiment. 
He wished "to be made nobly mad" by Ripley's appeal ; and when he de- 
cided not to go into the association, it was, as he wrote to Ripley, "reluc- 
tantly, and I might almost say with penitence." But though he always 
extended his sympathy and was a frequent and most interested visitor^ 
Emerson's whole philosophy was in opposition to the plan. There are too 
many references in the Journals and throughout his works and corre- 
spondence to include even a fair representation of the passages which 
illustrate his attitude toward Brook Farm; but it should now be fully 
apparent what his attitude would necessarily be. All that could surprise 
one is the delicious vein of humor running through almost all of these 
references. 

When the earlier, idealistic period of Brook Farm was succeeded by 
the more formidable, overtly socialistic period, — that is, when the ideas 
of Fourier were taken over and Brook Farm became a "phalanx" in the 
universal system, — Emerson's tone changed from good-natured raillery 
to open hostility. Fourierism he calls "the sublime of mechanics" (X, 
348) ; and when he says in other connections, "Souls are not saved in 
bundles" (VI, 205), or "Our society is encumbered by ponderous machin- 
ery" (II, 130), he is showing the same attitude that he always held re- 
garding all forcing of the individual by artificial means. In an article 
in The Dial for July, 1842, entitled "Fourierism and the Socialists," ^^^ 
he says on behalf of those who opposed the change at Brook Farm : "Our 
feeling was that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life.'" 
Couldn't Fourier know, he asks, a little farther on, that "a similar model 
lay in every mind, and that the method of each associate might be trusted,, 
as well as that of his particular committee?" And in the lecture on 
"New England Reformers," after stating somewhat ironically the purpose- 
of such communities, he continues : "Yet it may easily be questioned 
. . . whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to 
those who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong; and 

112 Republished in Uncollected Writings. N. Y. : The Lamb Pub. Co. 



BROOK FARM 87 

whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because 
each finds that he cannot enter it without some compromise. Friendship 
and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of 
the human race, banded for some catholic object ; yes, excellent ; but 
remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his 
friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multi- 
plies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or 
ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself beyond the stature of one" (III, 251). 

I trust that what I have said sufficiently indicates that it was not his 
lack of human sentiment, his aloofness and coldness, that kept Emerson 
out of the Brook Farm association, but rather the fundamental consist- 
ency of his thought. But does this answer as well for his isolation and 
apparent indifference regarding the other reform movements of the time? 
We can scarcely claim that. For was not the greatest of all — the freeing 
of the slaves — due largely to the very Emersonian determination to give 
the black man the chance to develop his independent individuality? Did 
not the temperance advocates endeavor to place other enslaved individuals 
in command of themselves? Were not those earliest stirrings on behalf 
of "women's rights" quite as much for the freedom of the individual? 
And was not this the case as well with other movements with which so 
many of Emerson's associates were identified? 

In the first place, Emerson did not remain apart from the practical 
work of the world to anything like the extent that he is sometimes ac- 
cused of doing. He attended the first national convention held for the 
political emancipation of women ; he attended town meetings and de- 
bated in a most interested way on good roads, honest tax collection, the 
distribution of public money, and the faithful performance of public ser- 
vice ;^^^ and so closely did he finally become associated with the anti- 
slavery movement that Chapman says he sent ten thousand sons to the 
war. 

But Emerson was never an agitator, and with reason. His fellow 
Transcendentalists were for the most part swept oE their feet by the 
various appeals of the time ; but to have been moved as they were would 
have shown in Emerson no fundamental conviction in his main beliefs. 
For if the things which called for reform in politics and in civilization 
itself should move us to rage and despair, are we not impeaching the 
divine order, and losing faith in the great evolving moral law ? Carlyle 
saw the variableness of appearance, for all his railing against our con- 
cerning ourselves with the "surfaces" of things, until he seemed to be- 
come blinded to the underlying unity of the eternal Good, and this re- 

1^3 Minot J. Savage, in the New York Tribune for May 25, 1903. 



56 ' EMERSON 

suited in his pronounced pessismism ; but Emerson never lost his hold on 
what to him were the fundamentals. Somehow, he felt, these horrors 
which we see must come into accord with the scheme of things, and that 
must never be scattered and identified with them. 

Thus Carlyle writes to Emerson •}^* "You seem to me in danger of 
dividing yourselves [the editors of The Dial] from the fact of this pres- 
ent universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and 
soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like, — into peril- 
ous altitudes as I think. ... It is the whole Past and the whole Future, 
this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very 
wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you." And Emer- 
son answers, somewhat later :^^^ "Of what you say now and heretofore 
respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life 
... I do not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law 
and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the diver- 
gence from it of the last act of Congress." And in an earlier letter, 
written when the fervor of his philosophic impulse was at its height,^^^ 
Emerson says: "My whole philosophy — which is very real — teaches ac- 
quiescence and optimism." 

That, therefore, which restrained Emerson from rushing into this 
and the other reform, was primarily his firm belief that "the whole frame 
of things preaches indifferency" (III, 62) ; "that a higher law than that 
of our will regulates events ; that our painful labors are unnecessary and 
fruitless" (II, 132) ; "that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and 
despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; 
that we miscreate our own evils. . . . Nature will not have us fret and 
fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better 
than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, 
or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or 
the Transcendental club into the fields and woods, she says to us, "So 
hot? my little Sir'" (II, 129). 

It cannot be denied that this bland optimism is somewhat mad- 
dening at times, when one feels deeply the need of definite and aggressive 
action. It is small comfort, when one is smarting under the injustice of 
certain special conditions, to be told that "it is only the finite that has 
wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose" 
(II, 126) ! But this is Emerson's first answer to the charge of indififer- 
ency to practical duties. "As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond 



^^•^ Correspondence, vol. II, pp. 11, 12. 

115 lb., p. 85. 

116 31 July, 1841. Correspondence, vol. I, p. 367. 



ATTITUDE TOWARD REFORMS 89 

surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails without an exception or 
an interval, he settles himself into serenity. . . . We need not assist the 
administration of the universe" (III, 269), But the other side of this 
matter was too obvious for Emerson to be wholly blind to it : While 
"the solar system has no anxiety about its reputation" (VI, 194), we 
must somewhat concern ourselves with our own reputations ; and al- 
though "there is a tendency in things to right themselves" (VI, 242), yet 
on the other hand "the fact that I am here certainly shows me that the 
Soul has need of an organ here" (II, 154). The individual cannot real- 
ize himself without reacting properly upon his environment : 

"Freedom's secret wilt thou know? 
Right thou feelest, rush to do" (VI, 204). 

Inasmuch, then, as "the sentiment never stops in pure vision, but will 
be enacted" (X, 104), and "our duty requires us to be the very hands of 
this guiding sentiment and work in the present moment," we cannot make 
Emerson's optimistic belief that things will come out right in the end 
equivalent to a mere fatalistic doctrine of laissez-faire, but we must seek 
farther for the full explanation of his neglect of much that he might ap- 
parently have done. There is something to be said by way of extenuation 
in what Professor James called "his fidelity to the limits of his gen- 
ius ;" "^ and Emerson himself freely admits from time to time that he 
would gladly have performed more and greater tasks. He records feel- 
ing a sense of shame and guilt at his avoidance of the appeals of tem- 
perance, anti-slavery, etc., but adds : "I cannot do all these things, but 
these my shames are illustrious token that I have strict relations to them 
all" (J. IV, 371); and moreover, the "good intention, which seems so 
cheap beside this brave zeal, is the back-bone of the world" (J. IV, 301). 
Like Mary, the optimistic sister of the industrious Martha, Emerson 
chose the better part for himself. But he does not deceive himself with 
this self-exoneration. It is easy and pleasant to lecture on anti-slavery, 
he tells himself in his Journal, and leave someone else to do your duty at 
home (J. VI, 534) ! 

At times Emerson does seem to place his own individuality above 
the more generous call of service to humanity; he seems to be an indi- 
vidualist at the expense of others. With deHghtful humor he puts this 
reversal of conventional altruism in favor of an almost Nietzschean self- 
assertion : "I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who were his 
companions? what men of ability he saw? He replied that he spent his 
time with the sick and the dying. I said he seemed to me to need quite 

11^ Memories and Studies, p. 23. 



90 EMERSON 

Other company" (VI, 250) ! The essay on Friendship exhibits somethings 
of this same attitude. There should be small consideration for the feel- 
ings of the friend, he teaches by implication, if the friendship jeopardizes 
one's own intellectual independence ; or, as Professor L. W. Smith, in 
comparing Emerson with Ibsen and Nietzsche, expresses this type of in- 
dividualism, "One must not permit himself to be materially hindered by 
consideration for others." "^ "One would think," says Vernon Lee, "were 
it not for the evidence of a hundred scattered utterances of most deli- 
cate loving-kindness, that Emerson was a fierce intellectual egotist like 
Abelard." "^ But no one who has read and loved his Emerson could 
seriously think of him as other than most generous, most considerate and 
kind, however much his personal selfhood might need defense from the 
multifarious appeals of this and that reform. Only, the individual must 
not be lost in the issue. The test is, "if we keep our independence, yet 
do not lose our sympathy" (VI, 20). By all means let us have reform 
when it educates the individual (VII, 28, 29). But we must not be 
swept out of our own orbit. And we must conserve our strength ; who 
would deny that? "A man's income is not sufficient for all things. If 
he spends here, he must save there" (J. IV, 301). 

But in the case of anti-slavery Emerson encountered a reform which 
dwarfed the pretensions of any individual. Here was an appeal which no 
thoughtful citizen could escape ; and it was particularly urgent upon one 
who made freedom the last reach of the soul's progress. Mere freedom 
from physical fetters was of course of the least consequence. "I have 
quite other slaves to free than these negroes," he wrote in his Journal as 
late as 1852, "to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the minds of men." 
And more openly, in his "Lecture on the Times," in 1841 : "How trivial 
seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the circum- 
stance of the slave. Give the slave the least elevation of religious senti- 
ment, and he is no slave" (I, 266). But it were sophistry and the most 
foolish of paradoxes to pretend that liberty was not better both for the 
individual and the race than bondage could ever be ; and Emerson knew 
well enough that, however superior to circumstance he might hold him- 
self, he could no more dodge this issue than the most matter-of-fact of 
his comrades. He knew at first hand the horrors of slavery from his 
stay in South Carolina and Florida, in 1826; he was humane by nature; 
and never the least afraid of that hostility and opprobrium which silenced 
many a northern minister who would otherwise have spoken on behalf 
of freedom. During his incumbency at Second Church, Boston, from 



-^^» Popular Science Monthly, LXXVIII, 149. 
119 Contemporary Review, LXVII, 348. 



ANTI-SLAVERY 91 

1829 to 1833, he opened his church freely to anti-slavery meetings, which 
was then an heroic — almost a desperate — thing to do. "Waldo invited 
me to be his guest in the midst of my unpopularity," writes Harriet Mar- 
tineau, referring to the stormy year of 1836. "He has spoken more 
abundantly and boldly, the more critical the times became." ^^° And in- 
deed there is nothing more interesting in the Journals than the record of 
Emerson's growing response to the call of the Abolitionists. 

One other consideration may be mentioned, though this applies to 
Emerson's attitude toward reforms of all kinds and not to anti-slavery in 
particular. "His objection to all reform," says Professor Woodberry, 
"which he always looked at dubiously in the concrete, was its partial and 
particular nature." "^ Emerson himself puts it much more strongly : 
"He who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at a special ben- 
efit. . . . There is no end to which your practical faculty can aim, so 
sacred and so large, that, if pursued for itself, will not at last become 
carrion and an ofTense to the nostril" (I, 205). 

Therefore, when Emerson says, "I cannot afford to be irritable and 
captious, nor to waste all my time in attacks" (HI, 249), he is not so 
much excusing himself as accusing his friends. "The Reform of Re- 
forms," he writes, "must be accomplished without means. ... I think 
the work of the reformer as innocent as any other work that is done 
around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better. It is 
done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously ; by management, 
by tactics and clamor. It is a buzz in the ear" (I, 263, 264). Now there 
are two ways of reforming men : by force, and by persuasion ; by law, 
and by precept ; by coercion, and by love. Emerson has the temerity to 
propose to us in all seriousness that "the way to mend the bad world is to 
create the right world" (VI, 214) ; that our task is "to tend to the cor- 
rection of flagrant wrongs by laying one stone aright every day" (I, 
235) > that "the remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure 
of crime, is love" (VI, 208). "The power of love, as the basis of a 
State," he says with charming naivete, "has never been tried" (III, 209). 

Regarding the freeing of the slaves, therefore, Emerson long held 
to the hope that this good might come by the force of love instead of 
through hatred and murder — as who would not ? If only the slave-owners 
would realize — as surely they soon must — how desirable freedom would 
be for the slave, and how beneficial to their own souls the granting of it, 
they must inevitably release these groping seekers after liberty ; and how 
much better that would be than if they were compelled to relinquish the 



''^^'^ Autobiography, vol. I, p. 375. 
121 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 69. 



92 EMERSON 

slaves against their will ! "To wish for war is atheism" he writes in his 
Journal (J. VI, 203), and he determined that he would "confide to the 
end in spiritual not in carnal weapons" (J. VI, 104). It is true that when 
war had become a necessity, he admitted that "there are times when gun- 
powder smells good," and his optimism triumphed in the reflection that the 
unawakened man might find great benefits from it: "If war with his 
cannonade . . . can set his- dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on 
the tough chrysalis can break its walls and let the new creature emerge 
erect and free, — make way and sing paean" (VI, 158). But this was 
merely taking the bull by the horns. So far as he has any theory regard- 
ing the relation of the individual to the work of practical reform, it seems 
to be that one should make of himself a shining example; let him love 
his neighbor ; and then all men, according to their own possibilities, 
would work out their individual salvations, the Spirit determining that 
this must be in the right direction and to a perfect accomplishment in 
course of time. "Let the soul be erect and all things will go well." 
"Whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and un- 
dertake the direction of [my neighbor] also, I overstep the truth, and 
come into false relations with him" (III, 204). "This is the remedy for 
all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be lovers and at once the im- 
possible becomes possible. . . . Let our affection flow out to our fellows ; 
it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions. . . . Let the 
amelioration of our laws of property proceed from the concession of the 
rich, not from the grasping of the poor" (I, 239). The "rich young 
man" was advised to sell all he had and give to the poor, and Emerson 
would consider the advice eminently practical ; no doubt it was, — but 
still the young man "went away sorrowful." Emerson's prescription for 
the world's woes did not really differ from that of Jesus. "He 
taught us how to live," says Edward Everett Hale ;^^^ "and he did so be- 
cause he lived himself" — in which, as in other ways, he reminds us of 
Chaucer's Parson. Theodore Parker "flung himself, sword in hand, into 
the thick of the conflict," says James Freeman Clarke ;^^^ "but . . . the 
power of Emerson to soften the rigidity of time-hardened belief was far 
the greater. It is the old fable of the storm and the sun." And so far 
as Emerson did enter into the conflict, that is to be accounted for by a 
sentence in one of his letters to Sterling.^^'* "The problems of reform" 
he wrote, as far back as 1840, "are losing their local and sectarian char- 
acter, and becoming generous, profound, and poetic." 



122 op. cit., p. 258. 

123 J\Jineteenth Century Questions, p. 247. 

124 Correspondence, p. 31. 



EDUCATION 93 

It would need no ghost new risen from the ground to tell us that 
there was one reform to which Emerson could give himself with complete 
consistency. "What we call our root-and-branch reforms," he says, "of 
slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. 
We must begin higher up, namely, in Education" (VI, 136). Imme- 
diately after his little book, Nature, Emerson gave his magnificent ad- 
dress on "The American Scholar," so justly called by Holmes "our in- 
tellectual Declaration of Independence ;" and his later lecture on "Edu- 
cation" (X, 123-156), says Edwin D. Mead, "is the most vital, pregnant 
and stimulating word upon general education which has been written by 
an American." In both cases Emerson's purpose is constructive re- 
form, — in the first instance fundamental, in the second more specific. In 
these, as in the many other passages where the matter of education is 
touched upon, Emerson regards education as "the only sure means of 
permanent and progressive reform" — to quote the words of President 
Emeritus Eliot. ^^^ Indeed, our whole consideration of this subject could 
lead us to no other conclusion. "His message, therefore," says Kuno 
Francke, "while fully accepting Fichte's appeal for self-surrender of pri- 
vate interests to public purposes, culminated not in the demand of con- 
centration, but in the demand of expansion of the individual." ^^® And 
what means for this expansion of the individual is there other than by 
substituting for the present cramping and confining system of education 
a wise, all-round, and "natural" method? 

There is no need for an analysis of Emerson's theory of education. 
What he has said on this subject is not cryptic but perfectly open and 
clear, and there are no apparent inconsistencies to be resolved. One has 
only to read the lecture on "Education" to fit its various contentions into 
the general scheme of Emerson's thinking which has now been analyzed 
with some fulness. And such other notes as one finds in the Journals, 
the Correspondence, and the collected Works only substantiate these 
views. 

One question, however, might be asked : How is Emerson's insist- 
ence upon the necessity of manual labor and scientific and technical train- 
ing as a basis for education consistent with his belief that "the spirit only 
can teach" (I, 132) ? On the one hand he anticipates Horace Mann in 
some of his definite and practical reforms ; on the other he derives from 
Pestalozzi (whom he frequently quotes in his Journal), in believing that 
"no man is able or willing to help any other man" (J. II, 483), since 
"every man must learn in a different way," namely, by self -education, and 



^^^ Atlantic Monthly, XCI : 846. 

'^^^ German Ideals of To-Day, p. 119. 



94 EMERSON 

"in reality there is no other" (p. 521). But it would be a wilful bor- 
rowing of trouble to find any essential difficulty here. The development 
of all a man's faculties is in a way a mechanical means of expanding 
his personality and of making him more capable of receiving truth from 
above. " 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education, since to 
ameUorate is the law of nature" (VI, 135) ; but at the same time "we 
feel that a man's talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth" 
(II, 270) — when they are cultivated for their own sake. On the prac- 
tical side, "Education makes man prevail over circumstance" (J. V, 
441) ; on the spiritual side the object of education is to remove obstruc- 
tions and let natural force have free play (J. Ill, 416). 

Hence the trouble with our colleges is that they "foster an eminent 
talent in any youth. If he refuse prayers and recitations, they will tor- 
ment and traduce and expel him, though he were a Newton or Dante" 
(J. VII, 56). There is too much machinery in our educational system; 
we lose the central reality and graduate a dunce (J. Ill, 275). So 
strongly does Emerson insist upon the superiority of instinct over culture 
(XII, 34), of genius over talent (II, 270), which are alike merely the 
transcendence of the "Reason" over the "Understanding," that one some- 
times feels, with Sadler,^" that he neglected the side of discipline ; and 
indeed to impose discipline, even upon a child, did seem to Emerson a 
going beyond one's just prerogative. The child, he always believed, 
would instruct the teacher as to the best method of procedure, and this, 
of course, could never be by coercion. But accuracy, system, drill, — 
these were by no means omitted from Emerson's educational scheme. To 
each he pauses to render tribute (X, 145; VI, 114; VI, yy) ; but these 
were always secondary, obvious, and not in need of special emphasis. 
He notes the disciplinary value of mathematics and the languages ; it is 
only when they ceased to have any "strict relation to science and culture" 
and "became stereotyped as Education" (J. VI, 289), that he objects to 
their crowding out of more vital and practical subjects. 

127 Educational Review, XXVI : 459. 



EMERSON S ESTHETICS 



95 



CHAPTER X. 

Emerson's Esthetics: The Meaning of Beauty; the Utility of Art. 

It is rather surprising that Emerson should have so Uttle of vahie to 
offer us by way of an esthetic theory, since he was primarily a poet, and his 
idealism was a complete system which reached into all the essential divis- 
ions of philosophy. What his esthetic theory would necessarily be has 
already become apparent to anyone (if there is any such person!) who 
has read thus far in this essay. This is a tribute to Emerson's funda- 
mental consistency, but not to the depth of his thinking. One could not 
read the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Pure Practical 
Reason, and then produce the Critique of Judgment, however consistent 
a part it may be of the Critical Philosophy. But Emerson's basic doc- 
trine of Intuition and his Puritanical ancestry predetermined all he had to 
say regarding the meaning of beauty and the utility of art. 

Emerson's ideas regarding beauty and art are among the first to find 
expression in his Journals. But even earlier than the theory are the 
critical judgments which are the logical if anticipatory conclusions of 
that theory, and they are not modified as the theory becomes formulated. 
He asserts that Wordsworth's "noble distinction is that he seeks the 
truth" (J. II, 430) ; whereas he is "frigid to the Byrons" (J. IV, 324), 
Tennyson he regards as "a beautiful half of a poet," ^-^ and to Shelley he 
refers so frequently and with such animosity that it would seem he enter- 
tained a religious aversion to all "art for art's sake." Later he becomes 
more tolerant : Shelley is good for others, so must not be overlooked, and 
Tennyson is good by one test — that he has a "liberating" effect on us (J. 
VI, 115, 218). It is the same with his judgment of fiction. At the age 
of twenty-one he writes in his Journal that one portion of the world's 
literature "seems specially intended for coxcombs and deficient persons. 
To this department belong the greatest part of Novels and Romances" 
(J. II, 13). Scott's Bride of Lammermoor appealed to him because of 
the nobility and symbolic significance of the characters (J. II, 371), 
w^hereas he was angry at having become so interested in Quentin Dur- 
ward that he read it through ; he "had been duped and dragged after a 
foolish boy and girl, to see them at last married and portioned, and I in- 



128 Letter to Furness, 1838, in the latter's Records of a Lifelong Friendship, 
p. 7- 



96 • EMERSON 

stantly turned out of doors." Had one noble thought, one sentiment of 
God been spoken by them, he felt that he would not have been thus ex- 
cluded (J. V, 515). Dickens succeeds because "monstrous exaggeration 
is an easy secret of romance" (J. VI, 312), and all "antiques" — as those 
of Landor, Goethe, Coleridge, Scott — are "paste jewels" (J. VI, 400). 
His judgment is the same regarding all the arts. Let one striking in- 
stance stand for the rest. Speaking of the ballet between the acts at a 
certain performance he reflects that "Goethe laughs at who can't admire 
a picture as a picture. So I looked and admired, but felt it were better 
for mankind if there were no such dancers ;" and he feels, moreover, 
that God agrees, since most of them are nearly idiotic (J. Ill, 113) ! 

These estimates of literature and the other arts would have been 
exactly what they are though Emerson had never had a philosophic or 
esthetic theory. Indeed, Emerson could not in sincerity have formulated 
any system of esthetics which would not have yielded just such results 
as these, however logically consistent it might have been. These, to him, 
were the facts ; and the test of any theory was that it should explain the 
facts (I, 10). What, then, does Emerson believe must be the underlying 
basis of truth of which these facts are the outcroppings? 

Emerson attempts no definition of beauty, warned, he says, by the 
failure of many philosophers who have attempted it (VI, 274) ; but no 
modern thinker, says Morley, makes so much of the place of beauty in the 
scheme of things. ^^® This is because he regards beauty as the truest rev- 
elation of the mystery of nature. ^^° "In the eternal trinity of Truth, 
Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the three, [the 
Transcendentalists] prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. . . . We 
call the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, 
escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true" 
(I, 334, 335). "The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful is a 
certain cosmical quality, or a power to suggest relation to the whole 
world, and so Hft the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural 
feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone — has in it somewhat 
which is not private but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is 
the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. . . . All beauty points at 
identity. . . . Into every beautiful object there enters somewhat immeas- 
urable and divine . . . Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm 
sky" (VI, 287-290). 

The perception of such Beauty is of course an act of the Intuition, and 



129 Crit. Misc., vol. I, p. 330. 

"0 See "The Poems of Emerson" by C. C. Everett, in Essays Theological and 
Literary. 



THE MEANING OF BEAUTY 97 

its contemplation belongs to the Reason and not to the Understanding. 
"Every man parts from that contemplation [of the universal and eternal 
beauty] with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal 
life" (II, 256). From this comes its ethical relationship, and from that 
in turn its practical utility when embodied in the form of art. From the 
very start Emerson insists upon this aspect of it: "Beauty is the mark 
God sets upon virtue" (I, 25) ; and to this aspect of it he constantly re- 
turns : "All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique 
sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus" (VI, 290). 

It follows that "nothing is quite beautiful alone ; nothing but is beau- 
tiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests 
this universal grace. . . . The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy 
the desire of beauty" (I, 29). In its last analysis, Emerson regards this 
perception of the beauty of the totality of things as an ethical and re- 
ligious matter, though he sometimes speaks of it more humanly as an act 
of reflection, of thought, or even by the esthetically technical term 
"imagination." "When the act of reflection takes place in the mind," he 
says somewhat vaguely, "when we look at ourselves in the light of 
thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty" (II, 125). 
"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they 
speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful" (VI, 287). But the imag- 
ination which creates this final beauty as an interpretation of the uni- 
verse is just as necessary in order to perceive any individual object as 
beautiful ; and this is only another way of saying that "not in nature but 
in man is all the beauty he sees" (II, 140). Every schoolboy has noticed 
that. The squeak of a bicycle on a lonely road mistaken for the note of 
a bird in the bushes was piercingly beautiful until it was recognized, when 
it became piercingly annoying. Yet it remained the same sound. A 
philosopher who finds the primary qualities of objects existent in the per- 
ceiving mind need not register his conviction that beauty does not exist 
in the things themselves. This familiar discovery, which Emerson seems 
to have first found stated in 1823 — "The theory of Mr. Alison, assign- 
ing the beauty of the object to the mind of the beholder, is natural and 
plausible" (J. II, 304) — he connected definitely with his idealism: "We 
animate what we see, and we see only what we animate. ... It depends 
on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine 
poem" (III, 54). 

In his poems, particularly in the "Ode to Beauty," Emerson develops 
these and kindred ideas, but I find no new phases of his thinking in 
them. "Each and All' is perhaps his best statement of the thought that 
the individual object gets its beauty from its relation to the whole. But 



98 EMERSON 

without discounting' the high vakie of this and many other poems of 
Emerson, one may still look to his prose for the most adequate account 
of his actual thinking. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as Emer- 
son holds that "Poetry preceded prose as Reason, whose vehicle poetry 
is, precedes the Understanding" (J. Ill, 492) ; and he constantly speaks 
of the poet as the inspired bringer of truth to men. But this is using 
poetry in its largest sense ; it is identifying poetic inspiration with all 
mystical intuition, — as Emerson frankly does. "This is Instinct, and In- 
spiration is only this power excited, breaking its silence" (XII, 32). 

Now as "Instinct," as he is here calling it, "has a range as wide as 
human nature, running all over the ground of morals, of intellect, and of 
sense" (XII, 33), so "the poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a 
point nearer the sky than all surrounding objects, down to the earth, and 
into the dark wet soil" (XII, 226). There is nothing new about this 
conception of the man of genius as the mediator between the highest and 
the most commonplace, except the mystical coloring which Emerson gives 
it. On the one hand, "when it [the Over-Soul] breathes through his in- 
tellect, it is genius" (II, 255) ; on the other hand, "to believe that what 
is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius" 
(II, 47). By the doctrine of Intuition, as has been noted earlier in this 
essay, all men may enter into a first-hand relationship with the source of 
wisdom; but there are many who prefer to dwell on the lower levels and 
who must therefore learn of the finer spirits who yield themselves to the 
reception of truth. It is the converse of the same matter to say, "What 
are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculp- 
tors ? Add a little more to that quality which now reads and sees, and 
they will seize the pen and chisel," and "Common sense ... is the basis 
of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise; and yet," 
Emerson hastens to add, "he who should do his business on this under- 
standing would be quickly bankrupt" (III, 68, 69). 

Emerson's doctrine of inspiration dififers from Plato's, as brought 
out in the Ion and elsewhere, only in its greater insistence upon the prac- 
tical usefulness of the message and in that the "some god" of Socrates 
becomes definitely the Over-Soul itself. To Plato he is careful to attrib- 
ute the thought that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not 
themselves understand" (II, 37), which he has paraphrased in the 
familiar lines from "The Problem," 

"He builded better than he knew ; 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

But this, like the ethical purpose of poetry, is with Emerson, as with 
Plato, a mere corollary of the inspiration theory. 



DOCTRINE OF INSPIRATION 99 

His fellow Transcendentalists shared with Emerson his belief in in- 
spiration, but did not always share his saving sense of humor. Jones 
Very, sending some of his poems and essays to Emerson, wrote, "I am 
glad to transmit what has been told me of Shakespeare. You hear not 
mine own words, but the teaching of the Holy Ghost." ^^^ Emerson 
escapes such egotism by making his statements of this sort impersonal — 
"All Vv^riting comes by the grace of God" (HI, 71) — and by fully recog- 
nizing that the individual does not cease to be himself when he is the 
recipient of a revelation. Indeed, he goes so far as to say, "To believe 
your own thought, that is Genius" (J. IV, 55), "A meek self-reliance I 
believe to be the law and constitution of good writing" (J. Ill, 550), and 
"What we say, however trifling, must have its roots in ourselves, or it 
will not move others" (J. II, 505). 

"Genius" therefore "is religious," because "it is a larger imbibing of 
the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like 
other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is 
superior to any talents they exercise" (II, 270). Hence it is no contra- 
diction for this believer in mystical inspiration to say, "If you would 
learn to write, 'tis in the street you must learn it" (VII, 16). The 
bringer of the message must resolve in himself the dualism between the 
truth he receives and the people to whom he gives it, by identifying him- 
self both with the original giver and the last receiver. "A painter told 
me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree" 
(II, 21) ; and on the other hand, "Perhaps, if we should meet Shake- 
speare we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a 
great equality, — only that he possessed a strange skill of using, or classi- 
fying his facts, which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter in- 
capacity to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect 
reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence 
find in us all" (II, 310). 

This is no more than to say, when we bring it down to the terms of 
literary criticism, that idealism is the method of all art, — that the subject 
must pass through the writer's or artist's personality, — only Emerson in- 
sists that since intuition is an act of piety the man of genius must neces- 
sarily be a "pious" man. At the age of twenty-three he mentions piety 
as one of the attributes of the "genuine bard" (J. II, 106) ; and before 
he is yet twenty he finds that there is a "tendency in the passions" which 
"seems to consist in the pleasure of finding out a connection between a 
material image and a moral sentiment" (J. I, 105). One would think 
that a man who took so didactic a view of art would be narrow beyond 

131 Cooke's Poets of Transcendentalism, p. 12. 



100 EMERSON 

belief in his literary and artistic judgments; but though Emerson is 
somewhat blind to the nheer beauty of such a man as Shelley, no one ever 
had a finer appreciation of the glory which is Shakespeare. This is some- 
what because of Emerson's recognition of Shakespeare's supreme art — 
''his principal merit is that he can say what he will" (IV, 19) — but much 
more because Emerson could not avoid putting such an ethical interpre- 
tation upon whatever appealed to him that he instinctively gave the most 
Christian coloring to the most pagan of men. One often smiles at his 
bundling together of some half-dozen worthies who were as far sep- 
arated spiritually as they were historically. Misery never made such 
strange bedfellows as have been brought together by Emerson's glowing 
admiration. But while his taste was so catholic, his ethical interpretation 
of art was not compromised. "Shakespeare, Herrick, Jonson . . . sug- 
gest the endowment of spiritual men" to such an extent that "Dante, 
Tasso, Wordsworth are pale beside them" (J. II, 236) ! Emerson in the 
voice of Genius hears always the moral tone even when it is "disowned 
in words" (X, 179). In saying "Only that is poetry which cleanses and 
mans me" (J. V, 402), he is saying not only that art is ethical but also 
that he is able to get an ethical reaction out of some poetry which has a 
purely esthetic value for others. It is strange that he remained obdurate 
to the call of Shelley, who has so high an ethical appeal to some who 
take even Shakespeare on a purely human level. 

According to Emerson, then, beauty is that which inheres in the idea 
or object to be imitated, and art is the expression which genius is able 
to give to it. While beauty is perceived by the Reason, art must be 
wrought under the guidance of the Understanding. Emerson emphasizes 
the divine rather than the human aspect of art, and thus he feels that not 
imitation, even in Aristotle's large meaning of the term, but creation is 
the aim of art (II, 327). For art cannot directly imitate beauty, since 
the Understanding cannot perceive at first hand what is revealed only to 
the Reason: "Go forth to find it [beauty], and it is gone; 'tis only a 
mirage as you look from the windows of diligence" (J. Ill, 556) ; but 
"certain minds, more closely harmonized with nature, possess the power 
of abstracting Beauty from things, and reproducing it in new forms. . . . 
This is art" (XII, 118). 

Since "the ofifice of art [is] to educate the perception of beauty" 
(II, 329), it follows that the principles of art are to be deduced from the 
nature of beauty. It is because "Beauty, in its largest and profoundest 
sense, is one expression for the universe" (I, 30) that "Art should . . . 
throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the 
beholder the same sense of universal relation" (II, 338) ; it is because 



THE UTILITY OF ART 101 

beauty "involves a moral charm" (VI, 207) that "the high poetry of the 
world from its beginning has been ethical" (J. IV, 425) ; it is because 
"Beauty rests on necessities" (VI, 279), and "what is most real is most 
beautiful" (XII, 117), that it is "idle to choose a random sparkle here or 
there" (VI, 51), and that when "lively boys write to their ear and eye, 
the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it" (III, 223) ; it is 
because "everything is a monster till we know what it is for . . . and 
then the thing tells its story at sight and is beautiful" (J. II, 489) that 
"our taste in building . . . refuses pilasters and columns that support 
nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show 
themselves" (VI, 276). 

Emerson, then, is to be numbered among those who reduce beauty 
to terms of utility and adaptability, at least so far as beauty appears in 
the form of art. Conversely, whatever is adequate to its purpose must 
necessarily be beautiful, and consequently Emerson anticipates Kipling 
in saying that the locomotive is not prosaic but highly poetic (J. VI, 
336), and he finds that "the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the ad- 
vantages of town and country life" (VI, 142). It is true that Beauty is 
a "nobler want" of man than mere commodity, (I, 21), and that "a. man 
is a beggar who lives only to the useful" (VI, 152) ; but the utility must 
still be there, however much Emeroon may say in his little poem, "The 
Rhodora," that "Beauty is its own excuse for being." Of course the 
highest utility is ethical, and when beauty seems most remote from the 
practical it may be nearest to the spiritual. "The critics who complain 
of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be 
done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable 
from our protest against false society" (VI, 275). But the advantages 
to be gained from art are often merely practical and useful. "I think 
sculpture and painting have an efifect to teach us manners and abolish 
hurry" (VI, 153) ; and "novels are as useful as Bibles if they teach you 
the secret that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success 
is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people" (VI, 

184). 

When, therefore, beauty is separated from utility it ceases to be 
beautiful. "Nothing merely ornamental can be beautiful" (J. IV, 88) ; 
indeed Emerson goes so far as to say that "outside embellishment is de- 
formity" (VI, 275). Applied in the province of literary criticism this 
leads him to say, "Don't afifect the use of an adverb or an epithet more 
than belongs to the feeling you have" (J. II, 427), for "the positive is the 
sinew of speech, the superlative the fat" (X, 160). But it does not fol- 
low that a work of art should be bare and stupid. "Beauty without grace 



102 EMERSON 

is the hook without the bait" (VI, 284), and dullness in a genius "is as 
insupportable as any other dullness" (J. VI, 359). 

Emerson was much more sensible to beauty in the human form and 
in nature than he is generally accredited with being. This is evidenced 
in the Journals ^^" more directly and positively than in the works which 
have always been familiar, and the publication of the Journals may in 
time correct this as well as other false impressions regarding him. But 
Emerson did not, apparently, feel any antagonism between sensuous 
charm and moral beauty ; or rather, he felt that the separation was arbi- 
trary and temporary, and one which the soul must readjust. "Whilst 
thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act 
partially, to sunder, to appropriate ; for example, — to gratify the senses 
we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. The 
ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one prob- 
lem, — how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual 
bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. . . . 
The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. . . . This 
dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. . . . Pleasure is taken 
out of pleasant things ... as soon as we seek to separate them from 
the whole" (II, 100, loi). Browning's "Nor soul helps flesh more, now, 
than flesh helps soul" must have appeared to Emerson as the statement 
of an axiom. He could scarcely have seen why Plato's two horses did 
not trot amiably side by side along the highway. 

I think it is this which prevents Emerson's esthetics from being 
more than a mere offshoot from his ethics. He does not grapple with 
any of the essential problems or throw any new light upon them. The 
pleasure to be derived from the tragic, for example, or the place of 
ugliness in art, are questions which do not exist for him. In his essay on 
"The Tragic" he says blithely: "There are people who have an appetite 
for grief. . . . They mis-hear and mis-behold. . . . All sorrow dwells in 
a low region. It is superficial ; for the most part fantastic, or in the ap- 
pearance and not in things" (XII, 265). And in his essay on "The 
Poet": "For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God 
that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and 
the Whole, . . . disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts" (III, 
23). Of course he recognzes the use that art makes of tragic material: 
"Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining 
into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. What would painter 
do, or what would poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells ? And 
evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, 

^32 See, for example, J. V., 118. 



EMERSON AS A POET 103 

magnificence and rats" (VI, 242). But this makes no contribution what- 
ever to the underlying problems of the tragic and the ugly. 

There seems to be no way of establishing the relative value of a 
poet, and everyone remarks that comparisons in this kind are particularly 
odious. But since Matthew Arnold shocked all Boston by asserting that 
Emerson, upon whom he places the highest of values, was still neither 
philosopher nor poet, and this has passed by his authority into something 
of a tradition, I may be pardoned for setting beside it three opinions on 
the other side. Hermann Grimm regarded Emerson as "the greatest of all 
living authors ;"' Theodore Parker gives him "the highest place since 
Milton ;" and Alexander Ireland, who quotes these judgments, says, 
"When the world is wiser, Emerson will be owned as a great poet." ^^^ 
Why should I not also indulge in the luxury of an opinion ? From a 
fairly careful reading of the major American poets, I venture the judg- 
ment that Emerson, while not a great poet in the strictest sense, should 
rank with Whitman and Poe as one of the three best that this country 
has produced. His distinguishing excellences are the height and depth 
of his thought, the perfect sincerity through which he reveals the charm 
of his personality, and at times his remarkable response to the beauty of 
nature. His chief limitations lie in the narrowness of his range, and in 
the haltingness of his meter and mechanical monotony of his rhyme, 
giving to much of his work an appearance of amateurishness of which 
the most minor of poets would be ashamed. And it is a proof of his 
authenticity as a poet that we should instantly feel that if the babblings of 
these bardlings were found on his pages, instead of enhancing his value 
they would actually detract from Emerson's standing as a poet. 

To a certain extent, the limitations I have mentioned are due to 
Emerson's being, as Professor Woodberry calls him, "a poet of imperfect 
faculty." To a much greater extent I believe they are the direct result 
of his esthetic theory, and that the value of that theory may somewhat be 
tested by the poetry it produced. For it must be remembered that, from 
the standpoint of technique, Emerson's early verses as a rule far surpass 
his later and greater poems. There is not a halting line in the tentative ef- 
forts at verse making given in the Journals till Vv-e reach about the year 
1834 and the poems which he chose later to include in his collection. 
With a more perfect gift of utterance no doubt he would have conveyed 
his thought as well as he does without putting any strain upon his art ; 
but when, as often happens with the best of poets, there was a conflict 
between art and thought,- — the idea being precisely this and meter or 
rhyme suggesting a circumlocution to that, — Emerson never hesitated to 



133 /jj Mcmoriani: Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 2i~, 37, 39- 



104 EMERSON 

put down the thing as he meant it and let the meter Hmp along as best it 
could. For the idea was the inspiration, was it not? and the meter and 
rhyme were no more than the Understanding's method of decking out 
what the Reason had perceived in one of its great silences. They should 
not be abandoned, as Whitman abandoned them, because they were the 
conventional graces which established a community of feeling between 
the poet and the reader ; but the moment that they asserted any claim 
of their own they became an offense and a hindrance. What Emerson 
does not seem to have laid to heart in this connection is that 

"Tasks in hours of insight willed 
May be through hours of gloom fulfilled." 

Perhaps he did not dare tamper with what the spirit had said to him ; 
perhaps he was more eager to supply new messages than to polish and 
correct the old ones ; perhaps he had that fear of mere art, of "rhetoric," 
which all men of deep sincerity have shared. When, as in the little poem 
called "The Snow Storm," the thought is merely pretty and poetic the 
art is fully adequate ; and in proportion as the thought is high the ex- 
pression is (in general) inadequate. If Emerson had chosen to work 
over his poems as Tennyson worked over his, he might, perhaps, have 
been as fine a poet as Tennyson ; but those who, as Matthew Arnold 
puts it, "would live in the spirit" would have missed something infinitely 
more precious. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

All of the material given in the standard Riverside Edition of Emer- 
son's w^orks is included, together vi^ith additional matter, in the Centenary 
Edition, edited with introductions and notes by Edward Waldo Emerson. 
Both these editions, as well as the Journals, are published by Houghton, 
Mififlin & Co. A later volume of "Uncollected Writings" was published 
by The Lamb Publishing Company (New York). Emerson's Corre- 
spondence with Carlyle, with Sterling, and with Grimm has also been 
published. Additional letters are given in Furness's "Records of a Life- 
long Friendship." Besides these, there is Emerson's contribution to the 
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoh. 

A full bibliography of Emerson by George Willis Cooke was pub- 
lished in 1908 (Houghton). The criticisms published since then may be 
found in the A. L. A. indices and publishers' catalogues, and it has seemed 
unnecessary to list them. With the exception of a few articles in some 
of the less known periodicals and newspapers, the writer has had access 
to all of these criticisms, and those which have seemed of especial value 
have in one way or another found mention in the text or footnotes. The 
Index of Names will therefore supply the place of a completer bibliog- 
raphy. A selected list of books and articles is given. 

Alcott, Amos Bronson : Ralph Waldo Emerson : Philosopher and Seer. 

Boston: Cupples, Hurd, 1888. 
Alexander, James Waddel: Review of Emerson's First Series of Essays 

in Princ. R. 13: 539. 1841. 
American Review : "Emerson and Transcendentalism," i : 233. 1845. 

Arnold, Matthew : Discourses in America. Macmillan, 1885. 

Bartol, Cyrus A.: "Emerson's Religion" in Genius and Character of 

Emerson. 
Bowen, Francis: Review of Nature in Christian Examiner 21:371. 

1837. 
Brann, Henry A.: "Hegel and his New England Echo" in Cath. W. 

'41:56. 1885. 
Cabot, James Elliot: A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Houghton, 

1887. 
Chapman, John Jay : Emerson and Other Essays. New York : Scrib- 

ners, 1898. 
Conway, Moncure Daniel: Emerson at Home and Abroad. Boston: 

Osgood, 1882. 



106 EMERSON 

Cooke, George Willis: Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and 

Philosophy. Houghton, 1882. 
Dewey, John : "The Philosopher of Democracy" in Internat. J. of 

Ethics, 13:405. 
Dugard, M. : Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sa vie et son oeuvre. Paris: 

Libraire Armand Colin, 1907. 
Diitton, J. F. : "Emerson's Optimism" in Unitar. R. 35:127. 1891. 
Eliot, Charles W. : "Emerson as Seer" in Atlan. Mo. 91 :844. 1903. 
Emerson, Edward Waldo: Emerson in Concord. Houghton, 1889. 
Firkins, Oliver W. : Ralph Waldo Emerson. Houghton, 1914. 

Francke, Kuno: "Emerson and German Personality" in German Ideals 
of To-day. Houghton, 1907. 

Frothingham, Octavius Brooks : Transcendentalism in New England. 
New York: Putnams, 1876. 

Garnett, Richard: Life of Emerson. Great Writers Series. London: 
Scott, 1888. 

Genius and Character of Emerson, edited by Franklin B. Sanborn. Bos- 
ton : Osgood, 1885. Contains notable essays by friends of Emer- 
son in the Concord School of Philosophy. 

Goddard, Harold Clarke : Studies in New England Transcendentalism. 
Columbia University doctoral dissertation. New York, 1908. 

Guernsey, Alfred Hudson : Ralph Waldo Emerson : Philosopher and 
Poet. New York: Appletons, 1881. 

Harris, William T. : "The Dialectic Unity in Emerson's Prose" in J. of 
Spec. Phil. 18:195. 1884. "Emerson's Philosophy of Nature" in 
Genius and Character of Emerson. 

Haskins, David Greene : Ralph Waldo Emerson : His Maternal Ances- 
tors, with some Reminiscences of him. Boston : Cupples, Upham, 
1887. 

Hecker, Isaac T. : "Two Prophets of this Age" in Cath. W. 47:684. 
1888. 

Hedge, Frederic Henry : Memorial address in J. H. Allen's Our Liberal 
Movement in Theology. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell : Ralph Waldo Emerson. .A.merican Men of 
Letters Series. Boston: Houghton, 1885. 

Ireland, Alexander: Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius, and 
Writings. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882. 

James, William : Address on Emerson in Memories and Studies. 

Lee, Vernon : "Emerson, Transcendentalist and LItilitarian," in Con- 
temp. R. 67:345. 1895. 

Literary World: Emerson Number, May 22, 1880, contains brief articles 
by Hedge, Bartol, Higginson, Walt Whitman, Curtis, Sanborn, 
Cooke, and others. 

Mead, Edwin D. : The Influence of Emerson. Boston : A. U. A., 1903. 
"Emerson's Ethics" in Genius and Character of Emerson. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 107 

Milnes, Richard Monckton : "American Philosophy — Emerson's Works," 

in Westminster R. 33:345. 1840. 
Morley, John: Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Essay. Macmillan, 1884. 

Also in Critical Miscellanies. 
Nicoll, William R. : "Ralph Waldo Emerson" in North Amer. R. 

176:675. 1903. 

O'Connor, J. F. X. : "Ralph Waldo Emerson" in Cath. W. 27:90. 1878. 

Orr, John : "Transcendentalism of New England" in Internat. R. 13 : 381. 
1882. 

Parker, Theodore : Lecture on Transcendentalism, Works, Centenary 
Edition, vol. VI. 

Princeton R. 11:95 (1839) "Transcendentalism"; 13:539 (1841) "Pan- 
theism." 
Rands, William B. : "TranscendentaHsm in England, New England, and 

India" in Contemp. R. 29:469. 
Riley, I. Woodbridge: American Thought. Holt, 191 5. 

Ripley, George: "Philosophic Thought in Boston" in Memorial History 

of Boston. Osgood, 1880. 
Robertson, John M. : Modern Humanists. London : Swan Sonnen- 

schein, 1891. 
Roz, Firmin : "L'Idealisme americain : Ralph Waldo Emerson," in 

Revue des deux mondes, 70:651. 1902. 
Salter, William M. : "Emerson's Views of Society and Reform," in In- 
ternat. J. of Ethics 13:414. 1903. 
Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin : The Personality of Emerson. Boston : 

Goodspeed, 1903. 
Santayana, George : Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Scrib- 

ners, 1900. 
Social Circle in Concord. Riverside Press, 1903. Contains addresses by 

LeBaron Russell Briggs, Samuel Hoar, Charles Eliot Norton, 

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William James, and others. 
Thayer, William Roscoe : The Influence of Emerson. Boston : Cupples, 

Upham, 1886. 
Tiffany, Francis : "Transcendentalism : the New England Renaissance," 

in Unitar. R. 31 : ill. 
Ward, Julius Hammond: "Emerson in New England Thought," in 

AndoverR. 8:380. 1887. 
Wendell, Barrett: A Literary History of America. Scribners, 1901. 

Wilson, S. Law : The Theology of Modern Literature. Edinburgh : 

Clark, 1899. 
Woodberry, George Edward : Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York : 

Macmillan, 1907. English Men of Letters Series. 
Woodbury, Charles J. : Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York : 

Baker, Taylor. 



INDEX 



Addison, Daniel Dulany, 19 

Alcott, A. Bronson, 8, 14, 16, 62, 71 

Alexander, J. W., 13 

Allen, J. H., 24 

d'Alviella, Goblet, 16 

Aristotle, 100 

Arnold, Matthew, 103, 104 

Bain, Alexander, 48 
Bakewell, C. M., 29 
Bancroft, George, 15 
Bartol, Cyrus A., 14, 29 
Berkeley, 35 
Blake, William, 63 
Birrell, Augustine, TJ 
Bowen, Francis, 8, 10 
Brooks, Van Wyck, 28 
Browning, 102 

Brownson, Orestes A., 11, 22 
Burns, 18 

Burroughs, John, 29 
Bushnell, Horace, T] 
Byron, 95 

Cabot, J. E., II, 12, 23, 24, 31, 35, 42, 

57, 59, 63 
Carlyle, 16, 24, 27, zi^ 80, 87, 88 
Chadwick, J. J., 20 
Channing, W. E., 11, 15, 17, 18-21 
Channing, W. E., (the poet), 16 
Channing, W. H., 16, 19, 20 
Clarke, J. F., 8, 12, 16, 20, 92 
Coleridge, 16, 20, 23. 24, 31, Z7, 47, 54, 
Conway, M. D., 30, 64 
Cooke, G. W., 8, 65, 105 
Cousin, 16, 21, 22, 23 
Cranch, C. P., 8, 16 

Dall, Mrs. Caroline, 23 
Dana, W. F., 77 
Darwin, 45, 46 
Dewey, John, 30 
Dickens, 8, 14, 96 



54, 



96 



Dutton, J. F., 79 
Dwight, John S., 16 

Edwards, Jonathan, 15, 18, 19 

Eliot, Charles W., 93 

Emerson, Edward Waldo, 5, 46, 105 

Everett, C. C, 96 

Everett, Edward, 15 

Fenn, W. W., 19 
Fichte, ID, 20, 23, 24, 35, 93 
Firkins, O. W., 5, 29, 31 
Fourier, 86 
Fox, George, 19 
Francke, Kuno, 93 
Frothingham, O. B., 9, 21 
Fuller, Margaret, Sec Ossoli 
Furness, W. H., 95 

Garnett, Richard, 28 
Goddard, H. C, 5, 14, 31 
Goethe, 62, 75, 96 
Greene, William B., 65 
Grierson, Francis, 77 
Grimm, Hermann, 30, 103 

Hale, E. E., 77, 92 

Harris, W. T., 71 

Harrison, J. S., 31 

Hawthorne, Julian, 80 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7 

Hecker, Isaac T., 14 

Hedge, F. H., 14, 16, 17, 19, 23, 24 

Hegel, 21, 23, 41, 43, 74, 75 

Henry, C. S., 22 

Herder, 45 

Higginson, T. W., 16 

Hodge, Charles, 10 

Holbeach, H., 64 

Holmes, 8, 28, 93 

Hopkins, Samuel, 18, 19 

Hudson, Thomas J., 63 

Hutcheson, 18 



109] 



110 EMERSON 



Ibsen, 27, 90 
Inge, W. R., 47, 75 
Ireland, Alexander, 103 

Jacobi, 23 

James, William, TJ, 89 

Jonson, Ben, 12 

Jouffroy, 21 

Judd, Sylvester, 16 

Kant, 7, 13, 18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 66, 95 
Kipling, loi 

Lamarck, 42 
Landor, 96 
Lee, Vernon, 90 
Leibnitz, 47 
Linberg, H. G., 22 
Locke, 14, 22, 24, 66 
Lockwood, F. C, 16, 31 
Lowell, 7, 16, 28 

Mann, Horace 30, 93 
Marsh, James, 23, 24 
Martineau, Harriet, 91 
Maulsby, D. L., yy 
Mead, Edwin D., 30, 93 
More, Paul Elmer, 28 
Morley. John, 96 
Miinsterberg, Hugo, 30 

Newcomb, Charles, 8 
Nicoll, W. R., -j-j 
Nietzsche, 89, 90 
Norton, Andrews, 10 

Oken, 45 

Orr, John, 9, 16 

Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, 14, 16, 26, 35, 

62, 75 

Parker, Theodore, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 

20, 22, 29, 63, 64, 92, 103 
Payne, W. M., 13 
Pestalozzi, 93 



Plato, 7, 26, 31, 42, 47, 50, 67, 98, 102 
Plotinus, 44, 71 
Poe, 103 
Porter, Noah, 9 
Putnam, George, 24 

Renan, 20 

Riley, I. Woodbridge, 5, 31 
Ripley, George, 10, 16, 24, 83, 86 
Robertson, J. M., 31 

Sadler, M. E., 94 

Salter, W. M., 83 

Sanborn, Franklin B., 16 

Santayana, George, 75, 78 

Savage, Minot J., 87 

Saxton, J. A., 9 

Schleiermacher, 23, 49 

Scott, 95, 96 

Schelling, 10, 20, 23, 24, 31, 32, 47 

Shakespeare, 12, 81, 100 

Shelley, 95, 100 

Smith, L. W., 90 

Socrates, 15, 98 

Spinoza, 63, 66 

Stael, Mme. de, 20, 22 

Sterling, John, 92 

Swift, Lindsay, 8 

Tennyson, 95, 104 
Thoreau, 8, 16, 84 
Ticknor, George, 15 
Tiffany, Francis, 12 
Tyndall, 30 

Vaughan, R. A., 47 
Very, Jones, 16, 99 

Walker, James, 15, 21, 22 
Whitman, 29, 81, 103, 104 
Wilson, S. Law, 30 
Wilson, W. D., 10 
Woodberry, G. E., 28, 91, 103 
Woodbury, C. J., 9, 27 
Wordsworth, 20, 54, 95 



VITA 

THE writer was born in Plainfield, New 
Jersey, November 6, 1873. He received 
his Ph. B. from Colgate University in 

1897, his A. M. from Columbia University in 

1898, and the Ph. D. was granted in 1904. He 
was instructor in English in the University of 
Texas from 1902 to 1905, since when he has been 
at Leland Stanford Junior University, where he 
is now an associate professor of English. He 
has edited Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship 
(Longman's, 1906), and contributed articles, 
mostly in Shakespearean criticism, to Anglia, 
The Modern Language Reviezu, Modern Phil- 
ology, Modern Language Notes, The Journal of 
English and Germanic Philology, and the Pub- 
lications of the Modern Language Association of 
America. His translation of Pathelin was pro- 
duced in 1900; his drama Compromise in 1908, 
and The Azuakening in 191 5. 



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